Little Pharma: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

Kolbe, Laura

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822966727 ISBN 13: 9780822966722

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

Synopsis

Winner of the 2020 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry 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 amidst the impersonal and engulfing chill that floods the anatomical theater and the corridors of illness. The poems trace the arc of a young woman’s life, from being a hesitant and anxious, newly-minted medical trainee to becoming an adept of the otherworldly logic of the hospital wards. In between, interludes on love, family life, and escapes into art and history bob and weave among the hospital poems, bringing back the hot clamor of the outside world. 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.

About this title

About the Author

Laura Kolbe is a physician, medical ethicist, and writer. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series and in American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Little Pharma, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her chapbook Keeping House: Six Longer Love Poems was selected by Kwame Dawes as the Center for Book Arts annual chapbook contest winner.She teaches and practices medicine in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822966727
• ISBN 13: 9780822966722
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128