Smoke

by Bryner, Jeanne; Smith, Larry; Sharp-schwacke, Susanna; Waid, Judy; Streets, Tammy

• ISBN13: 9781933964591
• ISBN10: 1933964596
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-07-09
• Publisher: Bottom Dog Press, INC.

Summary

Welcome to real-deal, no-happy-meals-sold-here poetry. With her nurse's hand and poet's eye, Jeanne Bryner cuts into hidden human geographies--bodies "unhinged" like weathered barn doors, an open chest's "ribbed canyon," and bone cells like "drunken thugs in a cave." She claims the body as working class without a union to negotiate. This collection is a stunning achievement, a howl against going gently into any good night, a life claim that hits, and hits, and hits back at death. Bryner's SMOKE, sweet and acrid, heals wounds we have yet to see. - Janet Zandy, author of Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work // Jeanne Bryner possesses a vigilant eye for wonder and a deep capacity for gratitude. Decades of clinical practice have honed the clarity of her vision.We stand with the student in the OR "breathing the same air as seasoned OB nurses" and we cheer when she recovers the missing needle. One need not be in the healthcare field, however, to recognize the heroes found within these pages: the firefighters who confront the smoke and flames, the resilient children who endure the unimaginable, the old men stalwart as trees. Bryner makes the commonplace shine, spins wonder from hard won gratitude. -- Geraldine Gorman, RN, PhD, College of Nursing, University of Illinois at Chicago

Excerpts

Tuesday Night Special



For a long time you sit The Charmed Diner's third red stool. Fran knows you take one sugar, double cream and your fingers like the cup's weight, its flawless fired surface, the warmth and sweetness of what's

inside. Newspaper stories you read waiting for hash browns, eggs over easy and toast, gauntlets of faces, folks you've never met, here and there, fighting lost causes, waving adversity's flags, patterns of bullet spray, a house fire where a plane went down. Aren't they ulcers on the world's giant foot? Last week, your bowling partner's elderly brother got all

jammed up when he ran naked down Oak Knoll claiming to be from Pluto. And Fran's crying, saying her son is into drugs. No wonder she forgot your ketchup. You were surprised just now by the obituaries,Carl's boy gone at thirty-five. Heart. And when Fran's finished, you give her your hanky, you don't jump on her raft, the brief suspension of her voice, because her wide, sad eyes remind you of your beagle, Slip,the gravel day he was hit, dying in the road, he'd lost a lot of blood and the old man wouldn't let your Mom take him to the vet for a good death. You're nearly sixty, and that open-faced sandwich is the Tuesday special you want someone to bring you (smothered with gravy) when it's your turn to give up this stool.