Standing in Their Fire: Poems from a Hospital Nurse - Paperback

Shawna Swetech's poems are both brutal and tender, testifying to the body's vulnerability, and the beauty of our humanity even in - perhaps especially in - moments of extremis. Drawing on her decades-long nursing career for vibrant details that nail the scene, Swetech brings us inside the hospital rooms where she encounters suffering and courage, agony and transcendence.

--Alison Luterman, author, Desire Zoo and In the Time of Great Fires

Reading this fine collection of poems, I am struck by Swetech's instinct for how to deliver a narrative, when to let a carefully observed detail speak for itself, and how much mystery a poem can embrace. A lyric poet who is also a compassionate caregiver and nurse, she finds the music and metaphor to render each experience with tenderness, unflinching accuracy, and wonder. Take, for example, her description of dementia as the "brain fold[ing] itself / into an intricate origami of pale cells / and broken shells." Even as she guides the reader through the chaos of the ER or the incurable horror of patients dying in their bodies, she never loses sight of the "brief / breathtaking intimacy / of eavesdropping on organs / performing / their moment-to-moment miracle."

-Terry Ehret, author, Night Sky Journey and Lucky Break, Sonoma County Poet Laureate Emerita

Here you will find an honest, ground-level view of what it's really like at the interface between healer and patient, the close calls, the bonding, the shared privacies all the way down to the touch and aroma at the heart of healing. As such it removes the mask that colors our understanding, and what we see is that, in this opening-up, there is an "artful and lovely" aspect even at the peak of pain and suffering. What is achieved here is that in the most isolating of circumstances there can be, by this "standing in" at the bedside, an almost spiritual companionship that endures and sustains through the pain and perils of illness.

--David Watts, M.D., author, Bedside Manners: Stories and Katy Bridge: Poetry