Heavy Metal Nursing (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781597322102)

Heavy Metal Nursing tells a story of love which, like all love stories, is a story of loss. It is not a sentimental love but a "heavy-metal" one, kneeling arm-to-arm beside parents caring for their daughter born with a severe brain injury who needs intensive care her entire life and dies at three years old. These poems hum the music of oxygen machines and chest compressions and respond to suffering with "half howl, half prayer." These are poems of vulnerability and pain, but also of parenting, caregiving, marriage, medicine, humor, tenderness, affection. Over and over, they ask what it means to be "learning / to make life out of this slow dying."