Tumor Moon - (Concrete Wolf Press Chapbook Award) by Jennifer Saunders (Paperback)

About the Book

The push of the poems move you through this very unified work, the elegant and surprising mix of medical/ scientific language blended with ordinary images, the emotion in each one.

-Raphael Kosek

Book Synopsis

The push of the poems move you through this very unified work, the elegant and surprising mix of medical/ scientific language blended with ordinary images, the emotion in each one. Each poem builds a crescendo you feel with the poet. There are a variety of forms to fit the specific subject of each poem that startle with both bluntness and eloquence. Not usually a fan of "medical/ disease" themed works, this one won me with its cool honesty and deftly articulated sentiment without sentimentality. You are with this woman and her son as she navigates their experience. And the "conclusion" is that there is no "end point" in this endeavor, only a resolve to move forward. Each time I read this, I loved it all over again!

-Raphael Kosek, author of Harmless Encounters, Winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Award

Review Quotes

Echo, recoil, return, resonance. The stunning poems in Jennifer Saunders' Tumor Moon gesture toward and from instances of "event free survival" and threat, exploring the shapes and contours of the un/endurable. In the terrible uncertainty surrounding the speaker's child's desmoid tumor diagnosis, Saunders deftly creates a standard of care through language that opens into the possibility for hope amid potential catastrophe. This collection is equal turns fierce and fragile, delivering a scorching encounter between permanence

and impermanence, griefwork and gratitude. It is a book that I want to think alongside again and again.

-Chelsea Dingman, author of I, Divided

What can a mother do when her child is diagnosed with a rare tumor, or rather what can poetry do? Saunders' Tumor Moon shows us just that, through innovative forms and images that haunt and heal. She takes us deep into body and psyche, at once clinical and tender, "I wanted that- / for someone to take a knife / to my son. Out with that dark moon / orbiting the future." Her lyrical verse makes transparent the struggle of bearing diagnosis and treatment, the struggle of getting a story that refuses comprehension into language.

-Julia Kolchinsky, author of The Many Names for Mother