Description:
Susan Palwick volunteers four hours a week as a lay chaplain in the emergency room of a local hospital. In Brief Visits, a single volunteer shift unfolds in forty-five sonnets, short poems allowing us to hear the many voices--the patients', the staff's, the chaplain's--of the ER. These stories, snippets of much larger ones, capture both the chaos and the beauty of the dramas unfolding every day in every hospital, where the human search for meaning is driven by stark reminders of mortality.
Review Quotes:
"Susan Palwick's poems remind me what I most love about hospital ministry--in her words, 'story understood / as sacrament.' Here are the small mercies and outsized emotions of a night in the E.D. the infinity of human stories unfolding. "These small rooms bestow / huge gifts, ' she writes, 'God's strangeness shining from each tale(.)' These patients are fortunate to have Susan's presence, a manifestation of God's caring hands and listening ear; and we are fortunate to have her poems, which encapsulate our sweet, painful, poignant human lives."
--Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, author of 70 faces and chaplainbook