This book explores previously unexamined overlaps between the poetic imagination and the medical mind. It shows how appreciation of poetry can help us to engage with medicine in more intense ways based on ‘de-familiarising’ old habits and bringing poetic forms of ‘close reading’ to the clinic. Bleakley and Neilson carry out an extensive critical examination of the well-established practices of narrative medicine to show that non-narrative, lyrical poetry does different kind of work, previously unexamined, such as place eclipsing time. They articulate a groundbreaking ‘lyrical medicine’ that promotes aesthetic, ethical and political practices as well as noting the often-concealed metaphor cache of biomedicine. Demonstrating that ambiguity is a key resource in both poetry and medicine, the authors anatomise poetic and medical practices as forms of extended and situated cognition, grounded in close readings of singular contexts. They illustrate structural correspondences between poetic diction and clinical thinking, such as use of sound and metaphor. This provocative examination of the meaningful overlap between poetic and clinical work is an essential read for researchers and practitioners interested in extending the reach of medical and health humanities, narrative medicine, medical education and English literature.

Elaine Feinstein's poems are the harvest of a lifetime in literature. This selection, made by the author herself, gathers work from over half a century of published writing, and is completed by a section of new poems. The selection ranges from early poems of feminist rebellion and tender observation of children to elegies for the poet's father and close friends, reflections on middle-age, the conflicts in a long marriage, and meditations on the lot of refugees. In new poems Feinstein records her treatment for cancer, her feelings of dread in the clinic and unexpected moments of 'extravagant happiness'. The exploration of memory is at once a source of ironic amusement and an acknowledgement of human transience.

In his sixth collection of poetry, the celebrated poet-physician Rafael Campo examines the primal relationship between language, empathy, and healing. As masterfully crafted as they are viscerally powerful, these poems propose voice itself as a kind of therapeutic medium. For all that most ails us, Alternative Medicine offers the balm of song and the salve of the imagination: from the wounds of our stubborn differences of identity, to the pain of alienation in a world of unfeeling technologies, to the shame of the persistent injustices in our society, Campo's poetry displays a deep understanding of hurt as the possibility for healing. Demonstrating an abiding faith in our survival, this stunning, heartfelt book ultimately embraces the great diversity of our ways of knowing and dreaming, of needing and loving, and of living and dying.

In Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses, sixty-five nurses from places as diverse as California and Alaska, South America and Europe, tell us in tough, revealing poems and prose what it's like to be on the front lines of health care. These nurses, both men and women, speak to us from intensive care units and operating rooms, from patients' homes and storefront clinics, from hospitals with the latest technology to small clinics in the steamy jungles of Nicaragua. They tell us what it's like to walk in their shoes and see the drama of illness and healing unfold before their eyes.

The title Little Pharma is both a doppelgänger and a cri de coeur: as the poet’s dreamlike double, the character Little Pharma navigates the murky channels of the hospital and clinic, the borderlands of the living and the dead, and the journey from novice to healer. At the same time, the poems plead for a return to a littler pharma, a space for stolen intimacy and momentary quiet amid the impersonal and engulfing chill that floods the anatomical theater and the corridors of illness. Little Pharma is a Dantean journey from the depths of an institution, and of a pervading personal dread, to a renewed celebration of human contact, the body, and the giddy, terrifying excitement of ongoing life. Excerpt from “Intensive Care” Doctor, I don my day-face like a net of cathodes, drained of all irruption, non-particular. Whose mask and sign is Sun. Enter this sickroom bugged with surging pentecosts of light, the green tracings of the representative heart. Permit now its miraculous whim.

This book assembles many of the foremost writers and clinicians in the field of team-based primary care to share their own relational reflections. It features narratives from fields such as integrated behavioral health, integrated primary care, primary care behavioral health, medical family therapy, health psychology, primary care psychology, and clinical social work. The key focus of the chapters are the relationships that are formed during primary care delivery. The book is organized into six core chapters: Family of Origin, Teachers and Mentors, Our Patients and Ourselves, Colleagues and Collaborators, Clinician as Patient, and Death and Loss. Each chapter contains a variety of styles and formats of narrative medicine, including personal reflections, story-telling, and poetry. Connections in the Clinic will be of interest to a wide audience of clinicians and educators dedicated to a reflective or story-telling approach to healing.