The Waiting Room Reader, conceived by co-sponsors CavanKerry Press and The Gold Foundation, was designed to bring the solace that literature provides to patients waiting for health care: routine or urgent. Waiting often leads to stress, anxiety, and the need for comfort. The Waiting Room Reader addresses that need by bring fine and accessible writing to “keep the patients company.” The inspiring stories collected within focus on life’s gifts – everyday pleasure: love and family, food and home, work and play, dreams and the earth.

During the pilot stage of the WWR project, 5,000 copies of The Reader were distributed without cost to over 200 waiting rooms in 28 select hospitals and medical facilities, and the response from patients and staff has been overwhelmingly positive. We hope to continue this book’s legacy — and now offer it for sale to even wider audiences.

978-1-933880-10-5
February 2009
$16.00

A strange and paranoid journey through the poet’s schizophrenia.

“…The word “mad” may conjure up notions that are either arty or primitive. Neither would apply in this case. One of the more stunning qualities of these poems is their composure, their lack of interest in histrionics. The poet’s ability to examine her behavior is both edifying and harrowing. A poem such as “Offering,” that speaks to the narrator’s burning herself with a lighted cigarette, is remarkable in its ability to turn and turn again as it considers the behavior…One realizes that once this poem was written this poet could write any poem because she has the ability to indulge metaphor yet not let up a jot on the terror of real circumstances. Whatever else has befallen her, in her poems she seems incapable of backing down…”
— Baron Wormser

These poems are the work of a first rate writer, one who has sounded the well of her own suffering to retrieve the wherewithal to transform pain into the most powerful and moving literature.
—Richard Selzer, Surgeon and Author

Pam Wagner has an exquisite voice that is quite marvelous. With precise language, and using memories from childhood and her struggle as a diagnosed “mentally ill” woman, she provides a strong and effective mirror to herself and the rest of the world.
— Leonard Cirino, Pygmy Forest Press 

1-933880-07-4
978-1-933880-07-5
February 2008
$16.00

These poems can be harrowing. Ten children, two troubled parents. The speaker’s own excesses and catastrophes (remember: a lot of the time frame of this book is the 1970s!) but always the author’s relentless honesty, clarity, understatement, humor, and skill keep the poems from tipping into the abyss of self-pity . . . The prime characters . . . are the mother, father, and the speaker. As the book . . . reaches its final sequence . . . , its most important character, the speaker’s brother, who died a suicide, by drowning, fully emerges. The strictness of the form . . . just does its job, which is to give a frame, a tension, something for the powerful emotion to work off of or against, and thus increasing its tensions, its powerful sentiment . . . By writing this book . . . Teresa Carson has rescued her family (as much as a family can be rescued) and rescued her brother (as much as the drowned can be rescued). That a book of poems can do this is a miracle. For which I am grateful.
—Thomas Lux

In admirably clear, tough-minded poems, Teresa Carson strips the masks from family and personal histories to expose terrible truths.  But these poems of nightmare and survival are not out to shock us. Over and over, with wit and tenderness, they bear witness to deep, inexhaustible love.
—Joan Larkin

Elegy for the Floater is a memoir in verse, a story that demands us to “Listen . . . listen even closer” to its chain-laden body crash into a river, to a brother barking, a rapist’s dog, a knife-wielding mother’s “I’ll kill you.” Deftly weaving dialogue with startling images, statistics, and a variety of poetic forms, Teresa Carson’s Elegy echoes Randall Jarrell’s warning: “Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain.” Thankfully, with Carson’s poems, there is also redemption and love, offering a fragile salve.
—Meg Kearney

1-933880-01-5
978-1-933880-01-3
February 2007
$18.00

Mark Nepo’s poems leech medicine from deep within each wound. They calibrate our heart’s careful attention so we may witness the reassuring alchemy that enables illness to live as healing; where brokenness emerges as wholeness. And most importantly, we feel how darkness, deliberately saturated with precise and loving awareness, can actually become light.
—Wayne Muller

Mark Nepo’s poems challenge us to consider the therapeutic possibilities of language. Heart to heart, soul to soul . . . Nepo takes us on an unforgettable healing journey, revising medicalized pathology reports and their dire prognoses into a deeply humane narrative of suffering, forgiveness, and ultimately triumph. Surviving Has Made Me Crazy—yes, for love, for life, and for the unthinkable prospect of solace and peace.
—Raphael Campo

Mark Nepo is a Great Soul. His resonant heart—his frank and astonishing voice befriend us mightily on this mysterious trail. These are words to live with, by and among—with deepest gratitude.
—Naomi Shihab Nye

Setting down this new volume of Mark Nepo’s poetry, I feel a cascade of sensations: hollowness in the belly, as if I am falling down and through, warmth circulating in the chest, a prior-to-speech pulsing in the throat. Together, in intimate accord, these poems offer articulate revelations about life, about being human, about what is most often left unexamined, unspoken, and therefore left unknown. This book is unrelenting, thrilling, achingly rough, palpable . . . a portal filled with life . . . to which I bow. 
—Saki Santorelli

1-9723045-6-8
978-0-9723045-6-6
February 2006
$18.00

My relationship with Robert Seder was intimately close but at the same time ruled by the head and not the heart. Chronicled in these pages is a tale of one man’s extraordinary grace, courage, and resounding epiphanies, set against the backdrop of the most complex and grueling medical interventions of the past century.
—Kenneth Offit, M.D.

To the Marrow is Robert Seder's intimate and searing journal of his five-year journey through a bone marrow transplant...The book is profound, not because Robert has died, but because any time a human being opens the door between life and death . . . we see and hear things briefly with an echo of the gods who normally stay out of view. It is up to us whether we dismiss such illuminations or take them as the unseen bedrock of our days . . . Robert opens the most honest conversation with no one and everyone on what it means to be alive, and to love and be loved"
—Mark Nepo

Seder's book is his day-by-day account of his own experience with an autologous bone marrow transplantation for lymphoma in 1992 . . . The story he tells is an insightful and deeply touching account of his journey and of the people he met. Central to his narrative are his caregivers…Some he loved, some he cursed, but the quality of his responses will not be forgotten…Although the book is about lymphoma and bone marrow transplantation, Seder's experience could be that of anyone with a severe illness who is undertaking a risky and potentially fatal therapy. As he enters his isolation room for the first time, he realizes that he is near the hospital where he was born. He writes, "I'm an old elephant come home to die and cannot find the watering hole under the parking lot." . . . The insights that he gives in his book will be illuminating for all who care for patients with severe and potentially fatal illness.
—Robertson Parkman, M.D. , The New England Journal of Medicine

BODY OF DIMINISHING MOTION
POEMS AND A MEMOIR
by Joan Seliger Sidney
(author bio)
Foreword by
Robert Cording, Ph. D.
Introduction by Bruce R. Ransom, M.D., Ph. D.
Poetry and Memoir
123 pp

6 x 9.25
Paperback 1-9723045-2-5
978-0-9723045-2-8
December 2004
$14.00

Sidney’s marvelous book . . . has not only turned illness, specifically multiple sclerosis, into a proper subject for poetry, it has transformed disease in general into something much larger than itself, something that embodies the quintessence of poetry and the fundamental struggle for balance between inspiration and control that all writers face . . . this is a book that most definitely was needed in the world.
—Pamela S. Wagner, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Sidney has MS and has confronted the gamut of practical and interpersonal dilemmas that can ensue. In this collection, she helps us experience her personal contest with this harsh illness. It is profoundly true that each person with MS has a unique story. It is equally true that there are common themes and Sidney’s voice skillfully illuminates many of these. Yes, this is a collection that will resonate most strongly with those who are familiar with MS or have lived with chronic illnesses, but the real beauty is that she has created satisfying literature that can be enjoyed on its own merits . . .
—Bruce R. Ransom M.D., Ph.D.

Joan Sidney braids the challah of her own nerve cells diseased by MS and the emotions and sufferings imprinted in her by genes which were tossed in a pit in Zurawno, worked and starved to death in Auschwitz. If healing is the ultimate goal, then the speaker must acknowledge that healing begins in the hellish, shadowy past of her ancestors . . . These poems and memoir are all of a piece. They trace Joan Sidney’s journey to “live fully with happiness, love and suffering.” She must live with MS and the past until they are “as much a part of me as my breasts and belly—not an enemy to hate, fight against, and try to destroy.” This is, indeed, the wisdom of the body that grows in spirit even as it diminishes.
—Robert Cording, Ph.D.

1-9707186-5-9
978-0-9707186-5-5
April 2003
$18.00

As I read this book over and over again, the tears welling in my eyes answered for me: yes, here is a life and a poetry that does matter . . .Hutner’s large-hearted work joins her not only with the greatest parent-elegists of lost sons—Ben Jonson, Ralph Waldo Emerson—but also with a poetics older even than Horace . . . Reading these poems, whose rhythms pound as hotly and audibly as the emaciated boy’s heart against his mother’s ear, whose memorable rhymes are like watermarks of tears on every page, we are returned to the purest, most elemental beginning of poetry.
—Rafael Campo, Ph.D.

This book . . . is a celebration of the life of a little boy named Sam . . . The photographs . . . could not be better or more poignant. Ms. Hutner’s poetry is not only moving, but is also that of a mother in profound grief over the greatest loss any of us can experience—the loss of a child. As an expression of personal feeling and memories, this book has no peer . . .
—Eric F. Grabowski, M.D., Sc.D.Attending Pediatrician, Mass General Hospital for ChildrenAssociate Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 

When a person hears the doctor say, “You have cancer,” it is impossible to comprehend what that means. Will I live? How will this change my life? How will this affect my family? When the person is a child, it is the whole family who asks the questions: the mother, the father, the brothers and sisters, the grandparents. This book shows us how one family lived. It will be valuable for all families, whether children are sick or well, to make us remember what the family is all about.
—Anne Moore, M.D.Professor of Clinical Medicine, Hematology and Oncology, Cornell UniversityNew York Presbyterian Hospital, New York