I want to share this beautiful book of poetry for your consideration.  Written by a courageous woman, it embodies so much of the struggle we go through with a diagnosis of breast cancer.

WHEN MY HEART GOES DARK, I TURN THE PORCH LIGHT ON

by Jane Underwood

Blue Light Press, 2017

Jane Underwood’s poems gaze at a fragile world of kith and kin, delivery guys, infusion nurses, leaves plastered to a sidewalk, inscrutable dead parents, and even victims of terrorism, an ocean away. Forged in the aftermath of a metastatic cancer diagnosis, these intimate poems can’t help themselves: they keep stumbling into wonder, humor, absurdity, and tenderness, even in the most unpromising circumstances. Underwood knew just how quickly a life can become provisional, but while her poems look squarely at the body’s hard truths, they never stop cherishing the cracked world. The vision here is so precise, the ear so acute, with a sense of juxtaposition so nimble, that even at their darkest, these poems radiate beauty.

For Jane, writing was a completely immersive experience. No matter what was going on in her life she almost always wrote for at least ten minutes a day. She wrote through exhaustion, and panic and physical pain, and fog brain, and relief and despair and rage and merriment.