I strived to represent the experience of being a pediatric healthcare worker during COVID.
This collection of poems is a glimpse into the lives lived on the margins, where the laws put in place to protect basic rights and bodily autonomy cease to apply.
"Once I have the first line or two, the rest of the poem seems to flow rather easily. I write whatever comes to mind. Somewhat like a story rather than a poem. I then start to take out the excess words and phrases and pare it down to the essence of what I wish to say. Other times I do not change a word. The muses come and go on their own. I also believe poetry has chosen me."
"The following autoethnographic poetry represents the experience of being a casual academic negotiating the workspace."
Humor acts as a defense mechanism, a pressure release valve, a teaching tool. As a heart surgeon, I have used laughter for all these reasons.
Through these reflections on heritage, I delve into being a child of parents who immigrated from the Bronx to a suburban lifestyle.
"I have continued to explore the usefulness of various poetic forms as a mechanism for providing access to suppressed internal voices."
This poem, entitled "Work Out," is about how I dealt with 2020. It's a writing exercise I didn't realize I needed to do.
“Tired,” the titular poem and the collection at large, is an autoethnography looking at the cause of so much pain, so much fatigue. Anthropomorphizing the feeling of being tired gave me creative license to dramatize and explore the real experiences of needing a break...
"This poem is rumination on how the personal experience of volunteering in never-before-seen flood relief efforts in the remote north reinforces the research that 'many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years.'"
Within the context of this poem, I tried to explain what was happening to my body because of SLE and what I was thinking.
"This autoethnographic poetry is born of my personal experience, witness, as well as currently chronicled and ancestral lore."