Survivor's Notebook by Dan O'Brien


ISBN
9781946724632
Published
Binding
Paperback
Pages
116

A collection of prose poems that chronicles the family life of two cancer survivors.

Dan O’Brien’s powerful companion to Our Cancers catalogs the recovery of a cancer survivor, whose wife has recently survived her own cancer, as he returns to his daily life while raising a young daughter. This prose-poem sequence is a true survivor’s notebook, using photos and the tools of memoir to evoke how disaster can constellate our past, present, and future.

In his poems, plays, and nonfiction, Dan O’Brien has explored, as he says in a 2023 interview, “how trauma shatters identity, and in its aftermath we reconfigure and rewrite, as it were, the story of who we were and are and maybe will be.” In highly personal poems reminiscent of dramatic monologues, as well as shorter lyric fragments, the protagonist reconsiders the people and places he knew before his illness, including his estranged family and others with cancer. While looking back he moves forward again, resuming his career as a writer and teacher, revisiting Ireland, and making a kind of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There is a confiding and at times comical tone in these poems as O’Brien awakens to the delights, absurdities, and wonders of existence, and as he and his wife work through the aftershocks of their trauma toward a deeper love.

With text and image, Survivor’s Notebook shows how we go on, with resilience, gratitude, and joy, when “the emergency’s elsewhere” now.
Christmas Catalogue 2024 x BookFrenzy
23.76
RRP: $27.95
15% off RRP


This product is unable to be ordered online. Please check in-store availability.
Instore Price: $27.95
Enter your Postcode or Suburb to view availability and delivery times.

Other Titles by Dan O'Brien


You might also like

The Golden Road
39.99
33.99
15% Off
The Soul
49.99
39.99
20% Off
Unruly
26.99
22.94
15% Off
Emperor of Rome
27.99
23.79
15% Off
Jerusalem
26.99
22.94
15% Off
Fake History
24.99
21.24
15% Off
Russia
26.99
22.94
15% Off
The World
29.99
25.49
15% Off
Mutiny On The Bounty
Peter FitzSimons
36.99
31.44
15% Off
Hell Ship
24.99
21.24
15% Off

RRP refers to the Recommended Retail Price as set out by the original publisher at time of release.
The RRP set by overseas publishers may vary to those set by local publishers due to exchange rates and shipping costs.
Due to our competitive pricing, we may have not sold all products at their original RRP.