New review of Robot Scientist’s Daughter, new poem in Interfictions, Lucia Perillo, and Dark Days

First, the good stuff!

Happy to have a new poem up at Interfictions called “Serendipity” (and yes, it references the sort of mediocre romantic comedy of the same name, and also has a line from the show “Community” and a reference to The Last Unicorn. Points if you can find them all!)

Thanks to Jannell McConnell Parsons and CrossTalk CellPress for this lovely – and science-minded – review of my fourth book, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, along with Natasha K. Moni’s The Cardiologist’s Daughter –  here: http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/the-poetry-of-nuclear-physics-and-cardiology

Dark Days

It’s the beginning of November, when the bright leaves of Seattle’s extremely brief fall have been blown away and the dark pretty non-metaphorically begins taking over. It’s dark when you wake, dark when you go to sleep, and often dark in between. The rain, which becomes ever-present this time of year, is cold – not midwest or northeastern cold, just cold enough to make you feel a little miserable, to make your face hurt and your lungs work harder to keep up.

After the death of Brigit Pegeen Kelly last month, Lucia Perillo, local (and terrific) poet, essayist and novelist – who started out as a wildlife biologist and became a writer after being diagnosed with MS at midlife – has passed away. She was tough, and funny. Her work – not just her poems, but her essays, and when I saw her speak – was breathtaking in its intelligence and bravery. She was a true inspiration as a writer and a person. Go read her work! “The body tells a story/ mostly about loss.” (From “Rotator Cuff Vortex.”) She has great things to say about responding to the question: “How are you doing” and not saying “fine,” about having a body – and then losing a body, slowly – that allowed her to paddle across lakes and climb mountains. She talked about disability in a way that helped me when I was stuck in a wheelchair and unable to process what was happening to me.

And it’s not just the loss of these two poets. I also lost a family member this week. This is on top of dealing with the unknowns of a metastasized cancer diagnosis that highly paid specialists cannot agree on how to treat, having a new neurologist tell me that my neural-lesion-related motor skill loss, difficulty with proprioception, and foot and hand numbness were permanent but it was obvious I was “working hard’ at physical therapy to help these problems (yeah, no doubt, I’ve been going once a week for six years, so hooray, finally some minor improvement!)  and of course the terror that is modern politics. (I’ve already voted, and I can’t tell you the feeling of sheer relief I felt when I got that voting ballot in the mail.)

I’ve found myself unmotivated to write or send out work in a way that’s unfamiliar to me. Maybe this year’s unfortunate surprises have started to wear on me. I actually bought a magazine yesterday because it had an article on planning “end of life” stuff. I read Max Ritvo’s pretty amazing Four Reincarnations – which is beautiful, but maybe not the best thing to read when you’re pretty sure you’re dying of cancer – the author died of cancer at 25 right before his first book was published by Milkweed. I don’t know if I’ve been processing the bad news enough, or maybe trying to ignore it a lot.  I have a life-long survival skill of focusing on the good stuff whenever possible, but there are times when you kind of have to face the bad stuff, too. I don’t know what to do next, because I feel unable to plan for the first time in a long time. I’m the kind of person who plans things out in advance, who likes to be prepared. And now I have to prepare for…what? The unknown, mystery. I’ve never been very comfortable with the unknown, even though I’m a poet and love Jung and the subconscious and folk tales that celebrate that dark forest path. I hope, I hope, I get a little light for the path.