Category: Uncategorized
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Letters from the Living
In Marie Howe’s poem, “My Dead Friends,” the speaker of the poem admits that when she’s “weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question,” she asks her “dead friends for their opinion.” As a response, “They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling–whatever leads/to joy, they always answer,//to more life and less […]
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Reimagining Pain by Katharine Jones
Overexpressed is honored to welcome guest blogger Katharine Jones. In this piece, she explores how the process of visualization helped her to deal with pain due to MBC. Katharine Jones spent her childhood in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. She works in Philadelphia as a Professor and writes about mindfulness and the challenges posed by […]
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Postcard Poem Writing Project
January 2016: Every morning my alarm goes off at 4:57 am. I pad downstairs in the dark. Pour my coffee. Close my eyes and breathe for ten minutes. Then, I read a smattering of poems from Ross Gay’s Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, Ada Limon’s Bright Dead Things, and Larry Levis’ The Selected Levis. I begin […]
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Overexpressed Asks: A Series Featuring the Voices of MBC
Overexpressed Asks is honored and privileged to feature the thoughtful, heartfelt, and honest reflections of NANCY HÉRARD-MARSHALL. Nancy is a mother, wife, artist, dancer, teacher, therapist, and healer, who uses her various life experiences to empower and foster healing. Among her areas of expertise are treatment interventions for culturally diverse populations with an emphasis on […]
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Narrative Explanation: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at MBC”
In writing the poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Metastatic Breast Cancer,” (featured on Living Beyond Breast Cancer’s Blog) I am indebted to Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” His poem inspired me, and the form of his poem offered me a container to hold thirteen different perspectives of metastatic breast […]
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Overexpressed Asks: A Series Featuring the Voices of MBC
In the next installation of Overexpressed Asks, we feature the brave and honest voice of Rachel Kraus. Rachel Kraus is a Professor of Sociology at Ball State University in Muncie, IN (about an hour north of Indianapolis) who specializes in gender, identity, and religion/spirituality. She earned her BA in Sociology from the University of Cincinnati, […]
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Bringing Consciousness to the Breast Cancer Process: Reflecting on Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals
On April 16, 2012, a month before my radical right breast mastectomy and TRAM flap reconstruction, I wrote in my new journal: Spent a long time looking at life reflected in a shiny car bumper. Space and distance distorted in its reflection. H. and I showered together this morning in the dark. I wrapped her […]
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Let Poetry Be the Refuge
I imagine in the quiet cottage of his brain/the sepia of this desert city,/wind, dirt, grit that scuffs your skin./Wish him gentleness in the shade of shadows. writes Loretta Diane Walker in her poem “Imagining My Neighbor” published on Poem-a-Day on April 8, 2022 National Poetry Month, launched in 1996 by the Academy of American […]
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Overexpressed Asks: A New Series Featuring the Voices of MBC
Overexpressed Asks is an ongoing series, featuring the brave and honest voices of women living with metastatic breast cancer (MBC). Overexpressed Asks is honored to feature Andra Kalnins. Andra Kalnins is a patient advocate, mindfulness instructor, a former nurse, and a family nurse practitioner graduate. She lives in Chicago, with her husband and 6-year-old son. […]
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Cinnamon Girl: Women Artists Cover Neil Young for Charity
Out shopping at Hideaway Music this past December, I was immediately drawn in by the cover art of Cinnamon Girl: Women Artists Cover Neil Young for Charity. Reminiscent of Neil Young’s legendary Decade album cover—a barren desert dotted with a solo guitar case, plastered with random stickers of hotels and hotspots, propped up by a […]
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