Poet and playwright Dan O'Brien chronicles the year and a half during
which both he and his wife were treated for cancer.
On the fourteenth anniversary of 9/11--an event that caused their
downtown apartment to become "suffused with the World Trade Center's
carcinogenic dust"--Dan O'Brien's wife discovers a lump in her breast.
Surgery and chemotherapy soon follow, and on the day of his wife's final
infusion, O'Brien learns of his own diagnosis. He has colon cancer and
will need to undergo his own intensive treatment over the next nine
months.
Our Cancers is a compelling account of illness and commitment, of
parenthood and partnership. This spare and powerful sequence creates an
intimate mythology that seeks meaning in illness while also celebrating
the resilience of sufferers, caregivers, and survivors.
As O'Brien explains in an introduction, "The consecutiveness of our
personal disasters, with a daughter not yet two years old at the start
of it, was shattering and nearly silencing. At hospital bedsides, in
hospital beds myself, and at home through the cyclical assaults of our
therapies, these poems came to me in fragments, as if my unconscious
were attempting to reassemble our lives, our identities and memories . .
. as if I were in some sense learning how to speak again."
