An Otherwise Healthy Woman - (The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention) by Amy Haddad (Paperback)

About the Book

These poems delve into the complexity of modern health care, illness, and healing, teaching us what should be the human response to suffering: take a moment to stop and respond to the longing for compassion in each of us.

Book Synopsis

First Place in Creative Works from the American Journal of Nursing's Book of the Year Awards
Second Place in Professional Issues from the American Journal of Nursing's Book of the Year Awards

The poems in An Otherwise Healthy Woman delve into the complexity of modern health care, illness, and healing, offering an alternative narrative to heroics and miracles. Drawing on Amy Haddad's firsthand experiences as a nurse and patient, the poems in this collection teach us to take a moment to stop and acknowledge the longing for compassion in each of us, what ought to be the immediate human response to suffering. The poet isn't afraid to explore her own fears and failures or to find joy and humor in the many roles women play. An Otherwise Healthy Woman presents the intimate experiences of a nurse, the vulnerable perspective of a patient, and the lessons of caring for family.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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.