Years ago, when my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, I wrote a poem about this debilitating disorder and the difficult symptoms that accompany it. The poem led to another poem about Alzheimer's, and then to other poems about other disorders. I ended up with a stack of disorder poems and wasn't sure what I was going to do with them. I decided not to compile them into a manuscript but to send them out individually, when I came across a call for submissions by Editor David Fraser for an anthology of poems related to (of all things) disorders. I sent a number of the poems off, and two were selected: "Lewy Bodies" the Alzheimer's poem, and "Vertigo." Both poems appear in this lovely book recently titled, As One Cradles Pain, which is now in print and soon to be released.
AuthorPetra Whitaker writes from Southern California, having recently lived in Chicago, and Ashland, Oregon. Archives
September 2020
|