(Note: This program first aired last year.) Our guest is the Kansas City-based poet and teacher Anne Boyer, who joins us to discuss her bold, well-written memoir of cancer. The book is called "The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care." As was noted of this book by The New York Times: "The pink ribbon, that ubiquitous emblem of breast cancer awareness, has long been an object of controversy and derision, but the poet and essayist Anne Boyer doesn't just pull it loose, unfastening its dainty loop; she feeds it through a shredder and lights it on fire, incinerating its remains.... [Her] extraordinary and furious new book, 'The Undying,' is partly a memoir of her illness...[and partly] a book that reflects on the possibility -- or necessity -- of finding common cause in individual suffering."
ST Medical Monday: "The Undying" (Encore)
