Healing Poetry for Cancer Patients and Survivors, Poets, Families, and Physicians
robynhuntpoetry.com
MY STORY
Among her former lives, Robyn Hunt owned a small bookstore in the San Francisco Bay Area and ran printing presses with a print and design collective, producing “bread and butter” jobs to enable the creation of poetry books and broadsides. While on the West Coast, she read poems with a cadre of smart misfits on the steps of city hall and in North Beach drinking establishments. She was arrested at least once protesting at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. She attended San Francisco State University, studying Creative Writing in the ‘70s during the early birth pangs of slam and language poetry. Returning more than 30 years ago to her native Santa Fe, she occupied a New Mexico legislative press box as reporter and hosted ongoing readings and other literary events in a bookstore on the Old Santa Fe Trail.
Her inaugural collection of poems, The Shape of Caught Water, was released in 2013 and selected for award by the New Mexico Press Women’s 2014 Poetry Division competition. Other writing includes a one act play, In Possibility: An Imaginary Correspondence, co-authored with Evangeline Brown and produced by Theaterwork in Santa Fe. Her work is also visible on her blog, As Mourning Doves Persist, and in various journals. She lives today with her husband in Santa Fe where she works as a development and communications director for a non-profit social services agency.
MY BOOKS
The Fiction of Stillness
These poems evoke the author's focus on finding respite during breast cancer treatment and recovery - the physical touchstones carried into the chemo ward, the calming touch of her daughter, cherry juice to offset the loss of taste, and an ongoing retreat to a nearby porch. This dialogue with cancer seeks to dispel fear and offer remedy, including the promise of milagros, the body's visible and invisible medical tattoos, and a renewed understanding of stillness and healing.
The Shape of Caught Water
In this human family, a man digs a hole in his backyard for a swimming pool. Another inks his lover's name on his knuckles. A wife sings to her husband who does not hear her. The inhabitants learn a language that lifts beyond the bills being paid, drunk on the tastes they had nearly forgotten.
​
This collection is available for sale directly from the author: robyn.covelli@icloud.com
Thanks to the editor and designer at Saddle Road Press for the exceptional production of this book.
NEXT EVENTS
Poetry Readings & Book Launch
​
​WHEN
This reading has taken place (first Sunday in May) but you can view a recording here.
The reading is just under one hour in length and opens with Robyn reading and follows with conversation between both poets and then a short set as well by Ellen La Flèche. More poems and more conversation follows.
WHERE
This was a virtual reading.
WHAT
How disease manifests as blossoms in the hands of poets. I will be reading with Ellen LaFlèche, a mutual Saddle Road Press author, in the press' First Sunday of the Month Reading series. Ellen's breathtaking collection, Walking into Lightning, explores
the shared experience of her husband's life with ALS. Her poems "explore physical love and loss, the complications of memory, of the small personal, persistent sorrows." My own title, The Fiction of Stillness, has been described in one review as "a map of the twisting road of cancer 'where soft tissue is knitted with worry stones' "
​
FROM THE POET
Excerpt from The Fiction of Stillness
Port
I take to the porch. The sun
my most reliable companion.
​
My daughter sang lullabies again
to me last night.
White floral fists of comfort
squeezing me to sleep.
Waking, I recollect picking
blackberries with my little sister.
Brushing our daring knuckles
between bramble and thorn scrape.
Today I boil eggs for dyeing.
Hard shells show cracks.
In their nest of sizzling water.
Nearly Easter and I long to find
the wafer-thin chocolate coins tucked
inside their gold foil wrap.
But plastic glue this morning is scratchy
icing on my chest incisions.
The chemo port's three-pronged star
like a tiny pill-bottle stopper pressing
against the skin from the inside.
Hidden hummingbird egg.
Tomorrow's discovery, since insertion,
will be sunrise mottle cackleberry,
bruise or badge between clavicle and
rise of the uncompromised.