The Language of Cancer

By Caroline Johnson

What is it to luminesce through fear? To sing through a treatment that feels like a poisoning? To recover by flying? The Language of Cancer is an invitation to move through territory at once familiar and defamiliarized by time and the intrusion of disease and the process of its transmutation. If we accept, we are graced to be guided through a pilgrimage that refuses to turn from pain or to valorize it. We learn, if we're willing, a new way to pray.

-Marty McConnell, author, wine for a shotgun

How does a poet find the language to write about cancer? It's been said that "poetry makes nothing happen," but in the case of Caroline Johnson's latest book, that's not the case. This book confronts the ugly truth of wrestling with disease in language the reader can feel in a somatic way - in other words, this book makes us feel what's going on, in blood and bone and heart and cell. Can poetry be made from hospital visits and oncology appointments, scars and surgery? This book is an affirmation of poetry when and where poetry is most needed. Our vulnerable selves deserve this book and this poet.

-Allison Joseph, author, LEXICON and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman

In this collection, every experience, from a bear encounter to placing a birdhouse to night driving to a bee sting, speaks in the language of cancer, a language the speaker shares even with a fox at the nature center: "I cannot fly, but like the cardinal I can sing. I come before you an injured thing." Johnson takes the reader on a journey from diagnosis to survival, from wondering "when my body became a foreign country" to being "ready for the morning, or for the / mourning, should it come." Johnson does not shield the reader from the ugliness of cancer, but also illuminates the deep joy of living and a stalwart sense of hope in the face of adversity.

-Donna Vorreyer, author, Unrivered

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 163980742X
• ISBN13: 9781639807420
• Release Date: June 2025
• Publisher: Kelsay Books
• Length: 138 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"