Maybe the best book to read while you are waiting for news of a loved one in hospital, waiting for the latest news of heart rate and infection, maybe the best book is not Anne Boyer’s The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer and Care, the book you bought in Vancouver last week to read as your loved one underwent surgery, maybe as you read it you will be filled with anger, with horror, with sorrow and you won’t be able to sleep easily, near the phone in case a call comes to summon you, maybe when you wake in the night and turn on the reading lamp, it will be there against the soft Ohio Star quilt, the third one you made when you were living in Utah and had some experience yourself with the American health system that sets up door keepers (Can you pay? Have you paid?), maybe you will take it up because in truth it is so difficult to put down, Anne Boyer’s prose radiant and genre-fluid in the best way, maybe sleeping easily is over-rated, maybe reading this book in the dark hours, a little beam of light on the page, is exactly what you need, what the living need, maybe it was waiting for you all along and you just didn’t notice.
...Theresa Kishkan 