The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Morality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer and Care

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The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Morality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer and Care

This book is on my short list of bests. I think every healthcare provider should read it and disabuse themselves of the nonsense they might be inclined to say to patients dealing with cancer. That sounds harsh, I know. But bear with me, when I was in grad school, relatively recently cancer free, I would listen to people in their 20s and early 30s, having not had cancer, regularly spew utter bullshit that usually began with the vapid generalization; “people with cancer…” fill in the blank of them saying things they had no clue about. And this attitude pervades in natural medicine circles and it's offensive and will, hopefully, run folks right out your clinic door if you speak this way to them about the cancer they are dealing with. 

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Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

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Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde is another writer, like Baldwin, before our current time whose words find deep resonance with the current challenges we face. If one wants to feel the impact of Lorde’s work in the present go to Alexis Pauline Gumbs ig page and watch her video the day after the election. Gumbs takes an Audre Lorde poem, reads it aloud so we can feel the poem’s vibratory energy and breaks it down into a call to action.

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James Baldwin: Living in Fire + Good Made My Face

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James Baldwin: Living in Fire + Good Made My Face

Mullen’s biography centers on Baldwin’s political engagements and their historical contexts throughout his life. In a way it is an intellectual biography that uses Baldwin’s specific political involvement as a lens. Mullen places Baldwin’s reality as Black, gay man growing up in Harlem as the gravitational center of his politics and from there was Baldwin’s commitment to saving himself and preserving his art but knowing that doing so also meant engaging with all those impacted by the persistent racism and homophobia that is a throughline from Baldwin’s time to ours.

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My Bright Abyss + Zero at the Bone

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My Bright Abyss + Zero at the Bone

Both books are similar enough to describe together. Abyss was written in closer proximity to his cancer diagnosis. It is shorter, maybe more concise. Whereas, Zero, written with some distance from initial diagnosis and with some life in between, is a bit further reaching, maybe less immediately dark. 


Both are meditations of sorts confronting difficulty through poetry. Wiman’s cancer diagnosis is in the background, subtext and rarely specifically referenced but knowing it exists adds a grindstone of reality to his inquiry. It’s also a meditation through some (though definitely not all) specifically Christian poetry.

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Conflict is Not Abuse

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Conflict is Not Abuse

I met up with a colleague for a coffee and some catch up time and this book was sitting on the table. Based on the title alone I wanted to read it. It’s a dense book and in some circles has been controversial as it challenges some ideas around abuse and has thus been criticized for enabling abuse itself. However, I think her point is incredibly timely, the book was published in 2016. One of her main premises is that often, discomfort is mischaracterised as “abuse.” This then has the impact of shutting down meaningful dialogue and truncates working towards repair.

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The Expressiveness of the Body + The Way of Water

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The Expressiveness of the Body + The Way of Water

The Expressiveness of the Body had been on my TBR stack for quite some time, like maybe years and The Way of Water I read during my first year of grad school. It was transformative in my understanding of the complexity of thought that undergirds Chinese medicine and my own inability to fully enter into that thought stream - rooted in utterly different epistemologies as we are.

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Under the Skin

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Under the Skin

There is too much to say about the state of healthcare in the U.S. The killing of a healthcare CEO catalyzed a spontaneous and near universal expression of outrage, not at the killer nor the crime, but at the ongoing crimes committed by the healthcare system itself, symbolized by one CEO. Under the Skin explores the specific way that healthcare commits crimes against Black people and Black women specifically.

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Dark Days: Fugitive Essays

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Dark Days: Fugitive Essays

This is in the category of “books that find us.” I had never heard of Roger Reeves before, nor this book. I think it was the “Fugitive” in the subtitle that caught my eye. It found the fugitive scaffolding in my brain from Fred Moten and Stefan Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and Fugitive Pedagogy; Carter G. Woodson and The Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis R. Givens.  Dark Days is one of the best essay collections I’ve read. His contextual juxtapositions are stunning. They become portals into new ways of thinking about our collective and individual experience.

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