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    • A Letter to My Younger Self by Candice Kim
    • Ambulance Stories | Benjamin Blue
    • Anguish
    • Body of Work | Anna Dovre
    • Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 | Mitali Chaudhary
    • Beholding Something Fine | Laura Johnsrude
    • Bypass by Benjamin Drum
    • Contents Have Shifted | Kristin Graziano
    • Curtis Prout, MD, Morale Doctor
    • Dr. Ortega and the Fajita Man | Richard B. Weinberg
    • Flo Owned a Beauty Shop... | Jose Bufill
    • The Healing Book | Dustin Grinnell Spring 2020
    • Mangoes | Rachel Prince
    • NOISE | Aparna Ragupathi
    • Not Today, Not Tonight | Donald Kollisch
    • Old Scrubs | Bruce Campbell
    • Physics and Big Lips | Malavika Eby
    • The Reluctant Ferryman | Colleen Cavanaugh
    • The Shape of the Shore | Rana Awdish
    • Something True | Sonny Fillmore
    • String of Pearls | Elizabeth Ryder
    • Things I Learned From Pole Dancing | Elise Mullan
    • Top Surgery | Angela Tang-Tan
    • Try to Turn a Cowboy Vegan | Towela King
    • Vicious by Tim Cunningham
    • Waiting Room | Shruti Koti
    • When the Screen Falls Away by Michael Rizzo
    • Wound Care | Craig Blinderman
    • Your First Pediatric Intubation | Rachel Kowalsky

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke

May 7, 2025 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness was published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2022.

What does it mean to be sick when medicine refuses to believe you are ill? In The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, poet, journalist and memoirist Meghan O’Rourke invites readers into the haunting, liminal world of unvalidated illness—a place all too familiar to millions suffering from autoimmune and complex chronic conditions. O’Rourke’s work is both a personal chronicle and a searing cultural critique, combining lyricism with investigative rigor. For readers of Intima, especially those who straddle the spaces of caregiving, patienthood, and medicine, this book is not merely relevant—it is essential.

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In Book Reviews, Health, Memoir, Medical Training Tags chronic illness, narrative medicine, doctors, patients, doctor stories
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Becoming a Better Physician: Insightful and Inspirational Stories from Attending Physicians, Residents, and Medical Students, edited by Mark Allan Goldstein and Kathy May Tran

February 23, 2025 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine
Becoming a Better Physician - book cover image

Every obstacle in the life of a medical student or physician leaves a mark. No one can truly know how they will cope with a spouse’s death, academic failure, a parent’s dementia, work-life upheaval, sudden trauma, or chronic debility. If left unexamined, the scars accumulate since, of course, the work of medicine and healthcare must continue unabated.

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In Book Reviews, Caregiving, Creative non-fiction, Essays, Health, Narrative Medicine Tags doctors, medical school, empathy
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Moving Along: A graphic medicine novel about Parkinson’s Dance by Lisbeth Frølunde, Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø and Louise Phillips

December 14, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative condition clinically identified by the hallmark features of shaking, stiffness and slowness. PD is also marked by a multitude of non-motor symptoms like constipation, cognitive changes and sleep disorders. Any number of symptoms and intensities can exist in each patient, leading to a remarkably heterogenous patient population. While effective symptomatic treatments exist, the only known means of quantitatively slowing progression to date is exercise, specifically cardiovascular exercise that increases heart rate (1).

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In Book Reviews, Caregiving, Health, Medical Research, Narrative Medicine Tags parkinson's disease, dance therapy, graphic comics, graphic medicine, caregivers
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Reckoning: Ten Seasons in Fire Island Pines by Miles Cigolle

September 18, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

"Reckoning: Ten Seasons in Fire Island Pines" by Miles Cigolle

In Reckoning: Ten Seasons in Fire Island Pines (Sunstone Press), the reader follows an extended period in the life of a gay man, Miles Cigolle. The book, written and narrated by Cigolle as its central character, covers the years from 1988 to 2000. Reckoning is thus an individual, personal story, but one that also reveals a critical moment of social history, highlighting how the supportive communal structure that was engaged in the early responses to AIDS had many roots in a place synonymous with sybaritic hedonism.

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In Book Reviews, Co-Constructing Narrative, Health, Medical Research, Memoir, Narrative Medicine, pandemic Tags Fire Island Pines, medical memoir, memoir, AIDS, HIV, gay life
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A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria by Caroline Crampton

August 29, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

In A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria (Ecco, Harper Collins, 2024), author Caroline Crampton combines what she refers to as a cultural history of hypochondria with a memoir of her experiences with anxiety disorder, allowing the history of it to inform her life and vice versa. Lest readers think they have nothing to learn about their own lives from a study of hypochondria, especially if they’ve never experienced it before, Crampton, a writer and critic who lives in England, reminds them that hypochondria has much to teach them about health. She goes even further by connecting the disease to gender and the mind-body divide.

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In Book Reviews, Co-Constructing Narrative, Creative non-fiction, Health Tags book review, hypochondria, illness narratives
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Scivias Choreomaniae, a poetry collection about madness and mystics, psychosis and prisons by Lake Angela

August 14, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

Scivias Choreomaniae (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), a poetry collection by Lake Angela, a poet, translator and dancer-choreographer from Lake Erie, transports readers to an outdated prison for schizophrenics and psychiatric inmates from medieval times to the time-space of the contemporary United States.

All who pass through the “mad-houses” are held behind wrought-iron words, including the author as dance therapist, whose great failure culminates when her augmenting madness fells her into a similar psychiatric ward. But her unusual success is that before her downfall, the poet uses dance therapy to rot the iron words of prison cells and chains, exposing the core of the institution where doctors and medical staff treat the patients with brutality.

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In Book Reviews, Caregiving, Health, Hospitals, Poetry, psychiatric biography, schizophrenia Tags poetry, poems, bipolar disease, prisons, psychosis, madness, medical humanities
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The Sky Was Falling: A Young Surgeon’s Story of Bravery, Survival and Hope by Cornelia Griggs

August 12, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

The sky is falling. I'm not afraid to say it. A few weeks from now, you may call me an alarmist, and I can live with that. Actually, I will keel over with happiness if I'm proven wrong," wrote Dr. Cornelia Griggs in her March 19, 2020, OpEd in The New York Times. Dr. Claire Unis reviews this reflective memoir.

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In Caregiving, Book Reviews, COVID-19, Creative non-fiction, Hospitals, Memoir, Mothers Tags COVID-19, narrative medicine, pandemic, pediatrician, pediatric
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Our Long Marvelous Dying by Anna DeForest

July 9, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

One moment of Anna DeForest’s Our Long Marvelous Dying, just published by Little, Brown and Company, captures the immense grief at the root of their new novel:

 In the interval between giving a dose of intravenous opioids and seeing the peak effect, I will sometimes pass the time by catching up on the news. There is almost always a disaster imminent…You get used to it…

A sense of resignation and detachment pervades the story told by an unnamed narrator, who works as a palliative-care fellow in New York City after the peak of the early COVID-19 pandemic.  In the first chapters, she recounts aspects of her training as a specialist, who “serves as a sort of illness interpreter, bringing the jargon of clinical medicine into the life and language of the patient who is living the experience.” It’s a specialty also “trained to be comfortable with [prescribing] the stronger stuff: morphine, hydromorphone, fentanyl.” As the fellow learns these skills, an assessment of how her specialty serves the dying patient and her colleagues becomes clear:

The trouble that the other doctors have is not a lack of gentleness. Well, not only that. More often what they cannot do is tell the truth. They pack death up in so much misdirection, talk about the success or failure rate of this or that procedure or treatment, when the truth is the patient will be dead soon no matter what we come up with to do in the interim. That’s the part they need a specialist to say.

 We also get glimpses of the narrator’s personal life: her relationship with her husband Eli, the dark ground-floor apartment they rent, the chess games she plays with her young niece Sarah, who her brother has left with them. We learn about the death of her father. Throughout the novel, the narrator seeks ways to withstand suffering—the global and local, present and past—in her daily existence.

Anna DeForest (they/their) is the author of the novels A History of Present Illness and Our Long Marvelous Dying, and a palliative care physician in New York City.

Photo by Stephen Douglas

Our Long Marvelous Dying is DeForest’s second novel and in some ways narratively follows A History of Present Illness, published in 2022, which challenged the lore of medical education through the story of a student managing her own personal trauma and the wider trauma of American healthcare. Reviews of DeForest’s first novel linked the writer, who works as a palliative care physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, to the narrator—and the same might apply to Our Long Marvelous Dying, as many moments seem pulled from the firsthand experience of a physician versed in hospice and palliative care.

In many of the novel’s settings, bereavement surrounds the narrator and often consumes her. But the grief that grounds the story and proves most unsettling for the narrator stems from the death of her absent and unkind father. DeForest structures the story to reflect the narrator’s apprehension towards him. We see him in pieces between scenes in the hospital, and can’t put him together as a whole until the very end. In managing the arrangements for his death, the narrator takes us through their fraught relationship. His favorite story to tell her romantic partners when meeting them for the first time is how whenever she cried as an infant, he said “I never liked you from the beginning.” But the cruelty of his abandonment is in its persistence—he is a “latent monster,” a “ghost” from whom she never stops craving acknowledgement.

Beyond her family, the narrator guides us through additional layers of grief in a way that we never stay long enough in one place to take up the devastation. The world offers constant tragedy—floods, destruction of coral reefs, extinction of thousands of species. And every day the COVID-19 pandemic rages. The reader hears about the refrigerated trucks lining New York City blocks, but what the reader sees in specific detail are the causalities for healthcare workers: their loneliness and coping mechanisms of alcohol use, disordered eating and SSRIs for suicidal ideation. During rounds, for example, an attending physician recounts the peak of the pandemic and says absently, “I am on an SSRI.” Meanwhile, the narrator notices the spring air coming through the window in his office that has “no bars, no screen. Fourteen floors up, with a view of the Empire State Building.” There is an omnipresent threat of self-harm, if not from one tragedy, then from the weight of so many others. 

But Our Long Marvelous Dying is not a trauma dump. It confronts the obvious truths we train ourselves to overlook: the truth of death in a hospital, the truth of our own progression to death. It forces the question of “what is the purpose of living?” and does not give a satisfying answer. In this way, the novel’s title does not allude to the hidden deaths in the hospice wings, it alludes to us. Without despair, the narrator states “that all of us will die…that all of us are dead already.” The narrator acts as a palliative-care physician for us all, interpreting the jargon and euphemisms that drown the simple truth of daily tragedy.  The sugar coating has dissolved, and she wants to communicate that “no one is coming to comfort you” and “nothing will help.”

 One of the most provocative aspects of DeForest’s work is their ability to situate the reader in the day-to-day clinical world. The narrator normalizes death, dying and the grim collapse of human bodies that happens, not because of dispassion, but because of routine. While contributing to the book’s undercurrent of grief, the hospice unit provides meaning on a quotidian basis. On a phone call, in response to a mother’s dismay that her daughter may die before they arrive, the narrator reflects: “of course she can and does die alone.” In another situation, she reflects that an aging actress “dies the same as anyone.” These are tragedies that are contained, expected and managed. 

Despite submission to muted sorrow, the narrator still attempts to manage her trauma. The palliative-care fellowship itself, in the view of its program director, draws those with personal layers of grief in addition to their professional interest. For the narrator, her work keeps the despair at bay and allows her to reflect on the minutiae of existence—for example, describing her underground commute as “the long stretch of track between where I live and everything that matters.” In revolving her life around the care of others, she does not have to generate her own will to continue living.

She also tries to endure by tempering her connections, especially to her husband Eli, a “well-adjusted” and handsome chaplain with a network of friends who adore him. The constant in their marriage is the restrained threat of its end, from “red flags” or laments that “it isn’t working.” This sense of detachment also manifests with her niece Sarah, who she describes as her “temporary daughter” while Sarah’s father is unable to care for her due to his substance use. We learn that an intergenerational dearth of attention and love has conditioned the narrator to the security of pain rather than love; the cycle of abuse contributes to her decision not to have children. The place where she seeks connection is a monastery out of the city, where she arrives and departs anonymous to her peers.  

While there is no neat resolution, the protagonist steadily approaches the grief that eludes her—the death of her father. We see this through the lengthening of the scenes themselves. Initially, we learn about her father in brief moments between scenes of her palliative-care fellowship; by the end, we are allowed to linger as she sorts through his belongings. For a person who asks uncomfortable questions (Are you happy?) and speaks revolutionary words in a hospital (death and dying), the narrator takes her time to confront his death. She asks a rabbi at the hospital what to do after death about the bad acts her father committed in his life. Just as she can cut through medical euphemisms and jargon, he cuts through her question: “The weight you feel, he says, is not a need to forgive anyone. Just call it grief. Call it trauma.”

In Our Long Marvelous Dying, DeForest challenges our discomfort with death and instead leads with loss and our search for meaning within it.—Margo Peyton


Margo A. Peyton is a resident physician in neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Prior to medical school at Johns Hopkins, she worked in film and television story development for DreamWorks Animation. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and the Boston Society of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry.

In Caregiving, Book Reviews, COVID-19, Death, Hospitals, Medical Training Tags death & dying, fathers, medschool, hospice
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Rearranged: An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer And Life Transposed by Kathleen Watt

January 28, 2024 Guest User

From the author: Bone cancer in my cheek ended my career as an opera singer and brought me face to face with mortality, disfigurement, the meaning and uses of beauty—and a lot of left over pieces.

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In Book Reviews, Cancer, Caregiving, Co-Constructing Narrative, Creative non-fiction, Health, Medical Research, Hospitals Tags cancer, opera, book review
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Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck

December 21, 2023 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

When I learned of an upcoming book about a man who turns into a great white shark, I thought this was another example of our need to tame a dangerous wild animal into something suitable for a child’s tee shirt. Shark Heart, A Love Story, Emily Habeck’s first novel (Simon & Schuster, 2023) is not that at all, but much more:  a love story about newlyweds Lewis and Wren, a meditation on our relationship with the animal world, and an exploration of illness and caregiving.  Shark Heart explores the characteristics we share with other species and the question of what makes humans unique, while it also considers how health and illness affect our relationships with other people.

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In Book Reviews, Caregiving, Health Tags novels, narrative medicine, sharks
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Seeing the Humanity in Himself: A Review of “The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight” by Andrew Leland

December 9, 2023 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

In “The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight” (Penguin Press, 2023), Andrew Leland digs into what people mean when they use the word “blind,” as there are medical definitions, in addition to legal uses of the term, as well as social constructs and expectations. The medical definition is complicated, as only 15% of people who are blind actually have no vision at all. Instead, they have some sort of substantial hindrance to full sight, but those issues vary wildly. In fact, most of the people in the book are more like Leland, people with some partial sight, even if that is nothing more than distinguishing light and dark patches of the world.

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In Book Reviews, Essays, Memoir, Narrative Medicine Tags sight, blindness, disability studies, medical memoir
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Beautiful Trauma: An Explosion, An Obsession and A New Lease on Life by Rebeca Fogg

April 4, 2023 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

Rebecca Fogg notes that there are innumerable responses to recovery, and she wisely avoids turning this story into a “how-to-survive-a-trauma” manual.  This is no misery memoir, one that concentrates on the vulnerability and suffering of the survivor.  She does describe the intense pain of the injury, however, in the objective, almost detached manner required of a scientist.  She has a relationship with her hand as an object of concentrated study. 

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In Book Reviews, Caregiving, Narrative Medicine, Co-Constructing Narrative Tags trauma, 9/11, memoir, medical memoir
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Uncaring: How The Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors and Patients by Robert Pearl

February 26, 2023 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

In Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors & Patients (published by Public Affairs), Dr. Robert Pearl, a Stanford professor, plastic surgeon, and former chief operating officer of Kaiser Permanente, writes a well-documented panoramic narrative and insider view that demystifies the complicated healthcare system. His book offers a disturbing look at healthcare system that has lost its purpose. Pearl relates inefficiencies and slow changes, as patient centric views held by physicians and systems that have failed to adapt, both to cultural and individual principles, held so dearly for decades.

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In Book Reviews, Caregiving, Co-Constructing Narrative, Cancer, Death, Health, Hospitals, Medical Research, Medical Training, Narrative Medicine Tags doctors, patients, healthcare, medicare, emergency room

Second-Generation Healing: The Holocaust poetry of Yerra Sugarman in "Aunt Bird" by Robert C. Abrams

December 19, 2022 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

The subject of Aunt Bird, a collection of poems by Yerra Sugarman, is the last year of the life of her aunt in the Kraków ghetto during Nazi occupation of Poland (Four Way Books, 2022). The book is a collection of impassioned poems about the lost hopes of a spirited, once-vital young adult.

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In Biography, Book Reviews, Co-Constructing Narrative, Death, Memoir, Narrative Medicine, Poetry Tags poetry, Holocaust, healing, narrative medicine

A History of Present Illness by Anna DeForest

November 21, 2022 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

The narrator of A History of Present Illness is a young doctor going through the daily initiation of learning her vocation. In the story, the narrator subverts the fabled tradition of medical education through her position as an outsider on the inside. We discover her history in increments: She grew up in an unstable home with a mother who drank too much. In her adolescence, she walks in to see her pregnant mother sitting on the kitchen floor shooting staples into her arm. Financial instability is a way of life, as is self-injury: The narrator cuts lines into the creases of her hands, to manage the suffering and hide her scars.

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In Book Reviews, Caregiving, Creative non-fiction, Death, Hospitals, Narrative Medicine Tags medical school, medical student, palliative care, death

Ordinary Deaths: Stories From Memory by Samuel LeBaron

October 24, 2022 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

Psychologist Samuel LeBaron’s book, “Ordinary Deaths” was recently published by the University of Alberta Press and in it, he examines the following truth without the drama often accompanying such writing: Death is not a heroic journey, a metaphorical “war” against fatal illness. It is, as the title states, ordinary.

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In Caregiving, Co-Constructing Narrative, Book Reviews, Death, Essays, Narrative Medicine, Memoir Tags death & dying, good death, clinical psychology
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Intimacies, Received: Poetry by Taneum Bambrick

September 27, 2022 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

Bravery, to me, is stepping forward to confront your fears and discomforts, despite the emotions holding you back. After reading Intimacies, Received, Taneum Bambrick’s moving collection of poetry, brave is the word that most readily describes the taut, sometimes treacherous path the poet takes to reclaim her sense of self and connection to her body after a traumatic event.

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In Book Reviews, Co-Constructing Narrative, Health, Memoir, Narrative Medicine, Poetry, Scars Tags poetry, sexual assault, gender, love, self-discovery

MedSpeak Illuminated: The Art and Practice of Medical Illustration by François I. Luks

September 12, 2022 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

MedSpeak Illuminated: The Art and Practice of Medical Illustration by François I. Luks is a remarkable volume that expertly brings together humanities and science.

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In Book Reviews, Health, Medical Research, Narrative Medicine, Scars, Medical Training Tags medical illustration, surgery, surgeons, anatomy, doctors
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Q & A about Neurocinema—The Sequel! by Eelco Wijdicks

August 29, 2022 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

When neurointensivist Dr. Eelco Wijdicks published the original Neurocinema: When Film Meets Neurology in 2014, his collection of film essays summarizing the portrayal of major neurologic syndromes and clinical signs in cinema served to underscore the field’s existence by being its premier textbook. Therein the medically-inclined movie buff or the film-frenzied clinician could explore medicine as it appeared on the big screen and better understand what the effects of medicine on film have played in our cultural milieu over time.

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In Book Reviews, Co-Constructing Narrative, Comedy, Death, Essays, Health, Medical Research, Narrative Medicine Tags brain, neurocinema, films, movie buff, psychiatry, neurosurgery
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The Kissing of Kissing: Poems by Hannah Emerson

August 15, 2022 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

In the book—the first in Milkweed’s Multiverse literary series curated by neurodivergent poet Chris Martin—Hannah Emerson ushers us into her evocative mental universe with its unique rhythms giving voice to herself as a nonspeaking autistic artist and poet.

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In Book Reviews, Poetry, Narrative Medicine Tags autism, freedom, love, disability, liberation, animal studies, neurodiversity, Ecology, radical self-love, interdependence
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