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In The Beautiful Language of Our Disaster, poet Dale Going, an early survivor of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, reflects with lyric grace and formal innovation on the reverberating trauma and long-term effects of illness, while connecting her rare cancer experience to the broader experience of the catastrophic world we’re all living in now. The poet’s decades-long experience as a professional patient, which radically altered her life, interrupted her career, and is a constant of daily existence, is addressed in poems resonating with the felt sensations of an afflicted body, while celebrating with exuberant life force the pleasures available—‘the body’s too small to live in’—in an embracing stance toward love, art, and the natural world. Going gathers up fragments, takes the tears and tears (weeping/rips), the world’s grief and error, and makes intimate wholes from the broken, as part of a poetic experiment in healing for ourselves, our others, our wounded world, in the only now.
Dale Going’s poetry includes The Beautiful Language of Our Disaster (2025, Codhill Press, 2024 Guest Editor Series selection,) For the Anniversaries of All Loving Kinds of Meetings (2025, Albion Books) Aerial Perception, (2003, Em Press) Leaves from a Gradual (2001, Potes&Poets Press), The View They Arrange (1994, Kelsey St. Press), She Pushes With Her Hands (1992, Em Press), Or Less (1991, Em Press) and As/of the Whole (1990, SFSU Chapbook Award, selected by Brenda Hillman). Her work has received support from the Fund for Poetry, California Arts Council, and Residency Fellowships at Yaddo, Watermill Center, Wedding Cake House, and Djerassi.
Paperback
Page count: 88
ISBN: 978-1-949933-30-7