Surviving Has Made Me Crazy

The title is more than tricky or artful, poetic wordplay. Nepo is a cancer survivor. This is the latest volume in the publisher's Literature of Illness imprint. As Rich Frankel, a professor of Medicine and Geriatrics, writes with regard to Nepo's poems in his Foreword, "[T]he experience of surviving a life threatening disease is not a return to homeostasis, the way things were, but rather a radical transformation from which there is no turning back." From his eighteen-year struggle with cancer, Nepo has developed a prescience. The poet does not lament, though there are moments of anguish, fear, and confusion. But these are basically way stations in what is mainly a spiritual journey, a transformation; and they are not left raw and abrasive, but put as a metaphor, insight, or adage true to the poet's prescience. "We are all just guests in a body/that comes and goes..." - from Earth Guest. Learning he had cancer was like "jumping/with full consent/into an empty well/so deep I only remember/falling into the dark/till falling without direction put me to sleep..." - from Thoracic Surgery. Both ancient paganistic and Christian ideas about the experience and the outcome of transformation are reflected in the poems. Knowing Nepo is a cancer survivor adds depth to the reading of the poems; but as with all good poetry, the poems stand on their own.