ABOUT THE BOOK:

With echoes of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman’s journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving, taking, and sacrifice.

With breathtaking lyricism and a vulnerability that pierces the heart, April Gibson journeys through the emotional abysses, the daily pleasures, the frustrations, and the joys of being a Black woman living with chronic illness. 

Gibson offers a unique perspective on “the body,” viewing disability and healthcare through both feminist and socio-economic lenses filtered by race and faith. Through gorgeous sensory language that migrates memories, from carefree innocence to the ravages formed in its absence, Gibson bears witness to grief, courage, and resistance to redefine herself on her own terms.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

A former resident of MInneapolis, April Gibson is a poet, writer, and professor whose work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Rhino Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. April has won The Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award and the Sustainable Arts Foundation Award. She has been awarded residencies from Write On, Door County and the Vermont Studio Center. She is a fellow of the Poetry Incubator (Poetry Foundation), the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and The Watering Hole Poetry Retreat. April is also a Tin House and VONA Writing Workshop alum, and her research has received support from the National Endowment of the Humanities. She teaches in the Department of English, Literature, and Speech at Malcolm X College in Chicago.