Dr. Wilk
 

The Seven-Year Night
Poems of the Medical Training Experience
by James Wilk


“Yesterday we had testicular tumors
but this afternoon we have ovarian ones...”


With tenderness and grace, Dr. Wilk takes us on his rounds, sparing none of the gruesome details of life on the wards. Here are the doomed anorexics, the shell-shocked teen watching television while his young girlfriend has a c-section, the elderly man wandering the halls in search of his dying wife, the teriyaki smell of cauterized diabetic flesh. Compelling, sad, and sometimes funny, The Seven-Year Night is medical treatment dispensed by the efficient hands of a physician, but lovingly described from the heart of a poet.


I listened to your silent lungs as you lay
prone, your spine and ribs sable-black,


crinkled and cracked as an heirloom bible
opened off-center‒let’s say somewhere


in the Book of Lamentations‒
and placed face down on the night


table to inspire some other day,
hunched, one side thick and curved.


~“The First Man I Pronounced Dead”


To purchase a copy of The Seven-Year Night, please visit www.BigTablePublishing.com and click on the “Titles” link. To read reviews and excerpts, please visit www.TheChapbookStore.com.


Thank you!
Robin Stratton
Big Table Publishing Company
Newton, MA

Thanks for the plug, Tim!

Chapbook number 2* for the Owl Man. All Right!

RM

* or are there more?

I re-read those first two lines from the press release grimly. My friend Liisa Erickson succumbed today to a particularly nasty ovarian cancer which metastasized into her bones and her brain. Dr. Jim, I thank you for dealing with life and death while I do little but deal out death to upland game birds. And write lots of poems! Timothy

My check is in the mail, Doc. I'm really looking forward to the read.

Nick

Jim,

Rising up from my vicodin-clouded rehabilitation to say congrats on this great news!

I found this in one of the reviews:

"Reading these poems, we meet a physician who loves his patients and is there for them at some of the most difficult times of their lives, and a poet who can write about his and their humanity in a way that is both moving and profound. These poems have given me a stronger sense of what it means to be human than anything I have read in a very long time. Thank you, Dr. Wilk."

Who could ask for a better review? Congrats!

Thanks,

Bill

I missed this earlier, Jim. So glad I found it now.

Big congrats to Robin for capturing you and big congrats to you for being chosen. She is a classy lady with good taste. And for those who don't know, she is also Editor-in-Chief at Boston Literary Magazine which has turnaround response times, (closed for subs at the moment though).

I know how to order!

I also missed this and am getting a copy that I shall pass along to my med student daughter - James, you might want to note that the Chap Book store's link to your publisher doesn't appear to work.

Frank