Save Cover Preview

Diary of Our Fatal Illness

This moving prose poem tells the story of an aged man who suffers a prolonged and ultimately fatal illness. From initial diagnosis to remission to relapse to death, the experience is narrated by the man’s son, a practicing doctor. Charles Bardes, a physician and poet, draws on years of experience with patients and sickness to construct a narrative that links myth, diverse metamorphoses, and the modern mechanics of death. We stand with the doctors, the family, and, above all, a sick man and his disease as their voices are artfully crafted into a new and powerful language of illness.

Read More Read Less

Phoenix Poets

Poetry

Reviews
Table of contents
Excerpt
Gallery
Awards
Author Events
Related Titles

Reviews

"Poet and physician Charles Bardes presents a work of prose poetry with elements of eulogy, ode, and tragedy as he follows his father's grievous two-year battle with cancer....In this challenging book of a father and son confronting disease and death, Bardes questions closely what it means for life to lend itself to death."

Booklist

“In his Diary in the form of a prose poem, Charles Bardes traces the works and days of a twilit ordeal of love and suffering. With Ovidian power and moral clarity, he tells how a man of the sea is given over to fire and a father and son are annealed.”

Susan Stewart, author of Red Rover

“Fashioning a remarkable and truly original account of an octogenarian father’s two-year battle with cancer, Bardes tells a powerful, allusive, and richly layered human fable about our common and ‘fatal metamorphosis.’”

Michael Collier, author of An Individual History