Poems of Shadows and Light: A Wellness Community Collection - Tapa blanda

This inspiring, interesting, moving and sometimes funny collection of poems comes from a group of friends meeting weekly to write about their encounters with cancer and with life. Sometimes all the structures we have relied on are taken away by pain and change; poetry can give us the chance to restructure things. In this book, a weaver launches her dreams into the treetops, an artist tackles a villanelle in his scanning chamber, a research chemist describes his chemotherapy in measured stanzas, an engineer writes of her widow's grief. A photographer records the details of beauty, an English teacher plays with form and rhyme, a counselor writes of unwrapping her new self. A mother undergoing surgery speaks to her daughter, an executive imagines the family supper table without him. A woman's visits to Poland and Canada give perspective on her origins and current life. As you will see from the poems in this book, a cancer diagnosis is not just numbers, and it is not just loss.

Maggie Rowe teaches poetry at the Wellness Community in New Castle County and gives readings across the area. She was a 2004 recipient of the Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowship in Literature for Poetry, and is a past winner of the Academy of American Poets Award at the University of Delaware. Her poems and stories have been published in national and statewide publications, including "Oberon" and "The Sun" magazines and the "Art and Poetry" collection published by the Biggs Museum of American Art in 2007. Her work is included in the 2008 University of Delaware Press anthology, "On the Mason-Dixon Line." She lives in Newark, Delaware with her husband and the youngest of her three children.