Tumor Moon

Echo, recoil, return, resonance. The stunning poems in Jennifer Saunders' Tumor Moon gesture toward and from instances of "event free survival" and threat, exploring the shapes and contours of the un/endurable. In the terrible uncertainty surrounding the speaker's child's desmoid tumor diagnosis, Saunders deftly creates a standard of care through language that opens into the possibility for hope amid potential catastrophe. This collection is equal turns fierce and fragile, delivering a scorching encounter between permanence

and impermanence, griefwork and gratitude. It is a book that I want to think alongside again and again.

-Chelsea Dingman, author of I, Divided

What can a mother do when her child is diagnosed with a rare tumor, or rather what can poetry do? Saunders' Tumor Moon shows us just that, through innovative forms and images that haunt and heal. She takes us deep into body and psyche, at once clinical and tender, "I wanted that- / for someone to take a knife / to my son. Out with that dark moon / orbiting the future." Her lyrical verse makes transparent the struggle of bearing diagnosis and treatment, the struggle of getting a story that refuses comprehension into language.

-Julia Kolchinsky, author of The Many Names for Mother