Brief Visits

"Susan Palwick's poems remind me what I most love about hospital ministry--in her words, 'story understood / as sacrament.' Here are the small mercies and outsized emotions of a night in the E.D. the infinity of human stories unfolding. "These small rooms bestow / huge gifts,' she writes, 'God's strangeness shining from each tale(.)' These patients are fortunate to have Susan's presence, a manifestation of God's caring hands and listening ear; and we are fortunate to have her poems, which encapsulate our sweet, painful, poignant human lives."
—Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, author of 70 faces and chaplainbook

"Susan's collection, Brief Visits: Sonnets From a Volunteer Chaplin, captures well the mood and the feeling of the Emergency Room. I know those rooms. I know those patients. I know those feelings. Once I started, I couldn't put it down." 
--Marshall Scott, M.Div, Board Certified Chaplain, Past President of the Assembly of Episcopal Healthcare Chaplains.

"Susan Palwick brings us readers through the rings of a purgatory awaiting us all. In spare, delicate, yet sturdy language, Palwick takes us by the hand, tenderly, to introduce us to human catastrophe, medical drama, simple losses, deep deep sorrows. The tourist couple who've just lost a fetus so young they barely knew it, the old diabetic losing his second leg, the rich mother disowning her wrist-slashed desperate daughter, the convict handcuffed to the gurney dying of his gastric cancer--these are only a few of the lives we witness through Palwick's poetic gifts. It is by virtue of her gifts that we are not destroyed by this look at frailty and mortality but feel elevated, strengthened, accompanied by her presence of faith. As she stops mid-day for a cookie and a banana, we readers stop for a moment, taking nourishment from her table set with grace, with wisdom, and with the great joy of, simply, being human. This is a poetic voice of power and force and, as well, a soul of depth and charge."
--Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University