Patient is a normal appearing woman in no obvious distress. On an ordinary day, out with her three-year-old in the park, Amanda Quaid received a life-changing call, the back pain she had been living with for years was actually a rare and aggressive form of cancer. In an instant, life became a series of sterile rooms, medical charts and body-altering treatments which completely upend Amanda’s marriage, work and family life as she knows it. Poetry became a lifeline for Amanda, a form to organize the chaos and pain of day-to-day life into order and beauty. In inventive and arresting poems that explore desire, marriage, motherhood and mortality, No Obvious Distress is a powerful memoir-in-verse about Amanda’s unique experience. But it is also a tender, witty and universal collection that asks how we can continue to live and love in times of uncertainty.
