Otherwise Healthy Woman

Amy Haddad is professor emerita in the School of Pharmacy and Health Professions at Creighton University. She is the author of the chapbook The Geography of Kitchens and has published poetry in a number of journals, including Aji Magazine, Persimmon Tree, and DASH Literary Journal. For more information about the author, visit amyhaddadpoetry.com.

“A clear-eyed look at what it is to be on both sides of America’s health care system, this book of poems offers rare insight into the humanity of the health care professional and the humanity of the patient. Spare and truthful, sorrowful and wise, these poems are necessary in both their deep empathy and their fierce gaze into mortality.”-Ada LimÓn, author of The Carrying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award “Amy Haddad’s poems impress and move as much for their implacable precision as their empathetic alertness to the variations of human pain in the twenty-first century, across a family, an individual life, a world. An Otherwise Healthy Woman is, as one of her poem titles tags it, a ‘hire-wire’ act, at once accomplished and devastating.”-Robert Polito, author of Hollywood and God “The stories weave in and out with an incredible understatement that brings the stakes out to you like a slap.”-Matt Mason, Nebraska state poet “Haddad’s poems are masterfully crafted and painfully honest-at moments, even harrowing. Yet here is a poet who, when the tension gets to be almost more than the reader can bear, offers up her own brilliant brand of comic relief. One of the strongest collections of poetry I have read in years.”-Cathy Smith Bowers, former poet laureate of North Carolina and author of The Abiding Image

• Contents1. In the Clutch of a Rubber BandMaking CampCafeteria-2013AdmissionsFlexion/ExtensionThe Day after Memorial DayAt RehabHome AssessmentFlipping Garlic ToastFrom the Motel WindowWhole-Berry Cranberry SauceThe Promises Women Make to Each OtherMy Role as the WifeThe Fit of Suffering2. What We Did on the FloorOvertureA Guide to the Physical ExamBlame PlacingDehiscenceGallows HumorSecond-Degree BlockThe White Stucco HouseFamilies Like ThisThe Course of LeukemiaDay’s End at the Farmer’s Market in MontparnasseTen Items or Less3. Cut along the LinesStereotactic BiopsyNuclear Bone ScanAn Otherwise Healthy WomanInfidelityChemotherapy LoungePost-OpCat ScanChemotherapy Side EffectsFrench Weaving for DamagesBefore- and After-BreastsPort-a-CathDark RidesHigh-Wire ActNew to the JointOde to a Freckle above My Left BreastOarsmen at ChatouCut along the LinesJug ShotsBottom of the CupThe Commercial Version of Metastatic Breast CancerAcknowledgments