[Tim Murphy]

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