Overview
Fierce, frank, witty poetry about cancer diagnosis, treatment, remission, and end-of-life. Written in the last three years of her life, Andrea Werblin Reid's To See Yourself As You Vanish is a collection of unsparingly brave and insightful poems about her experience with ovarian cancer. Frank, fierce, and witty, her work does not hide behind cliches, platitudes, or tropes, but addresses the hopes, frustrations, fears, and longings that would be easy to leave unspoken. She offers friendship and understanding to those who share her experiences and powerful insights for caregivers and those who work in oncology, hospice, research, and psychology. Of these poems, Reid herself said: ""I have struggled with the implications of war metaphors and the perspectives they perpetuate since receiving my own cancer diagnosis. People living with cancer and other chronic illnesses are not taking up arms, they are living as long and as humanely as possible: not to win or lose, simply to live."" The scenes in these poems are rich and spare, magical and sane, awful and special: ""one bird comes to the end of his branch looking like a clever moustache. /one bird comes to the end of his song like an ordinary bird."" [sample poem] THE COLOR OF WAITING is hypnotic pink, under whose spell you've been living for years like a small fossilized creature. or magenta, a bruise that evolves, so you must continue to adjust your secrets waiting is rosy, a soft-spun medical soundtrack of static frizz, machine screech then sharp as the serrated smiles doctors have been honing for years. waiting masquerades as the inflatable idea of hope, waterproofed for safety, maybe, devoid of vision, punctured that easily
Full Product Details
Author: Andrea Werblin Reid
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Imprint: Wesleyan University Press
Weight: 0.318kg
ISBN: 9780819502070
ISBN 10: 0819502073
Pages: 96
Publication Date: 31 October 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Available To Order
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Reviews
""Reid's To See Yourself As You Vanish is a heart-wrenching work of witness. In this lyrically lush, posthumous collection, a door is opened to an authentic and compassionate contemplation of life and death. And through that corridor, one many of us live in fear of, Reid unflinchingly models writing for her life while braving death's imminence. This is not simply a book of glorious poems but rather a poetic of legacy in which readers inherit Reid's indomitable wit, robust imagination, and interminable curiosity. At once a mirror and a promise, this collection subverts its own title making sure the body's vanishing is not the last word, or ever can be.""--Airea D. Matthews, Yale Series of Younger Poets Winner; Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize ""Often with illness narratives, we only honor the stories of recovery, of healing, of 'being cured, ' but that ignores the full human truth that mortality is the engine of our existence. With Reid's powerful poems we see a complex and brilliant rendering of the courage it takes to both fight the fact of death, and release to death at the same time. In these poems, I found something I rarely see, the feral urge to survive wrought into unique anthems that praise the dark as equally as the light.""--Ada Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate; Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry ""Andrea Werblin Reid refutes the common assumption that ""the moment something starts dying / it is no longer living."" Unsparingly focused on the confusion, hopelessness, and anger spawned by an unlucky diagnosis, her poems give us ""a closer peek at the ending"" for those ""alive while dying."" A courageous book.""--Susan Gubar, author of Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer
""Reid's To See Yourself As You Vanish is a heart-wrenching work of witness. In this lyrically lush, posthumous collection, a door is opened to an authentic and compassionate contemplation of life and death. And through that corridor, one many of us live in fear of, Reid unflinchingly models writing for her life while braving death's imminence. This is not simply a book of glorious poems but rather a poetic of legacy in which readers inherit Reid's indomitable wit, robust imagination, and interminable curiosity. At once a mirror and a promise, this collection subverts its own title making sure the body's vanishing is not the last word, or ever can be.""--Airea D. Matthews, Yale Series of Younger Poets Winner; Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize ""Often with illness narratives, we only honor the stories of recovery, of healing, of 'being cured, ' but that ignores the full human truth that mortality is the engine of our existence. With Reid's powerful poems we see a complex and brilliant rendering of the courage it takes to both fight the fact of death, and release to death at the same time. In these poems, I found something I rarely see, the feral urge to survive wrought into unique anthems that praise the dark as equally as the light.""--Ada Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate; Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
Author Information
ANDREA WERBLIN REID (1965-2022) is the author of Lullaby for One Fist (Wesleyan, 2001) and Sunday with the Sound Turned Off (Lost Horse, 2014). Her poem ""Language is the Virus"" was named a finalist for the prestigious Perkoff Prize from the Missouri Review and her work has been published in the LA Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Brooklyn Rail, Pank, Smartish Pace, and more.
