The Radiation Sonnets: For My Love, in Sickness and in Health

I literally just closed the back cover of this book and it’s one of those books that I just had to write about right away. Though I suspect that with this book, I could wait a year to write this review and those thoughts would still be there. I just happened upon this book on Paperback Swap the other day and decided to request it. It’s poetry. By Jane Yolen. Can’t be bad, right? Right…not only can it not be bad, but it’s some of the absolute most moving poetry I’ve ever read. I’d put it in the same category as Katrina Vandenberg’s Atlas. Though they have very different topics, the feelings that they induced were the same. This is not “hard to read” poetry…as so much of it is to me. It’s raw…it’s show more emotional…it’s hard to read in that emotional sense. But it’s easily understood as it comes from the heart and the head.

Jane Yolen wrote this book as her husband was receiving radiation treatments for an inoperable cancerous tumor in his skull. She set out from the beginning to write a poem each night after he received radiation. The choice to publish these poems was made afterwards, to help others going through the same thing.

As you can imagine, these are tough poems to read. But they’re oh so beautiful and I’m so very happy that I stumbled upon this book. There are many poems that bring a tear to the eye, but there are those that cause laughter too. Yolen addresses the idea of death…of losing her partner of 40 years. She chronicles his days, his lack of appetite, loss of hair, his pains, his triumphs, her weaknesses along the way. And she does it all so beautifully.

I think we all know someone who’s been taken by cancer or who has beaten cancer. I have a cousin that died a couple of years ago after a years long battle with breast cancer. I just recently had a scare that my father could have pancreatic cancer…he doesn’t. But in that moment when the doctor said that he could, my world changed. I can’t imagine if a battle with cancer had ensued. I think Yolen does such a remarkable job in capturing this process. show less

This was my National Poetry Month read, a collection of 43 sonnets that Jane Yolen wrote during her husband's radiation treatment for brain cancer. The only way I can describe it is "intense" - intensely personal, honest, emotional. More than one poem made me tear up and I often stopped after only two or three sonnets just to let it settle. Highly recommended.