The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer

Anne Boyer understands that “pain doesn’t destroy language: it changes it.” As a poet, Boyer follows this maxim within the body of her latest book, The Undying, writing through the ways her recent experiences of pain surrounding triple-negative breast cancer—its diagnosis, treatment, and aftermath—change her language and her understanding of medicine, politics, livability, and community. This book is biopolitics after biopolitics, extending 20th-century Foucauldian thought to the 21st century, with its literal-symbolic horrors of pink fracking drills.

Boyer writes from a place of relative neoliberal failure—as a cis, white woman, but also as a woman woman. But she does not remain there in any static sense. Instead she hovers slightly above the surface of facticity, like Saint Teresa of Avila, finding room for transcendence in and through socio-economic realities.