Overview

Welcome to real-deal, no-happy-meals-sold-here poetry. With her nurse s hand and poet s eye, Jeanne Bryner cuts into hidden human geographies bodies unhinged like weathered barn doors, an open chest s ribbed canyon, and bone cells like drunken thugs in a cave. She claims the body as working class without a union to negotiate. This collection is a stunning achievement, a howl against going gently into any good night, a life claim that hits, and hits, and hits back at death. Bryner's SMOKE, sweet and acrid, heals wounds we have yet to see. Janet Zandy, author of Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work // Jeanne Bryner possesses a vigilant eye for wonder and a deep capacity for gratitude. Decades of clinical practice have honed the clarity of her vision.We stand with the student in the OR breathing the same air as seasoned OB nurses and we cheer when she recovers the missing needle. One need not be in the healthcare field, however, to recognize the heroes found within these pages: the firefighters who confront the smoke and flames, the resilient children who endure the unimaginable, the old men stalwart as trees. Bryner makes the commonplace shine, spins wonder from hard won gratitude. -- Geraldine Gorman, RN, PhD, College of Nursing, University of Illinois at Chicago

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9781933964591

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Reviews

The poems in Jeanne Bryner s SMOKE reveal her to be an angel of mercy not only in her work with patients but also in her ability to create poems that comfort and guide us as we face universal fears: sickness, personal and societal abuse, family tragedy, physical pain and emotional longing. Bryner intertwines striking images and perfect metaphors in poems that use nursing as a lens through which to view the world of healthcare as well as the lives of families, communities, and the art of writing. Because she has witnessed moments only a nurse might, she is able to plunge through the poem s surface event to reach the ineffable. Her poems dig deep, reaching what Emily Dickinson called the zero at the bone. -- Cortney Davis, author of The Heart s Truth: Essays on the Art of Nursing

The poems in Jeanne Bryner's SMOKE reveal her to be an angel of mercy not only in her work with patients but also in her ability to create poems that comfort and guide us as we face universal fears: sickness, personal and societal abuse, family tragedy, physical pain and emotional longing. Bryner intertwines striking images and perfect metaphors in poems that use nursing as a lens through which to view the world of healthcare as well as the lives of families, communities, and the art of writing. Because she has witnessed moments only a nurse might, she is able to plunge through the poem's surface event to reach the ineffable. Her poems dig deep, reaching what Emily Dickinson called the zero at the bone. -- Cortney Davis, author of The Heart's Truth: Essays on the Art of Nursing

Author Information

Jeanne Bryner was born in Appalachia and grew up in Newton Falls, Ohio. She is a practicing registered nurse and a graduate of Trumbull Memorial Hospital s School of Nursing and Kent State University s Honors College. Her books include Breathless, Blind Horse: Poems, Eclipse: Stories, Tenderly Lift Me: Nurses Honored, Celebrated and Remembered, The Wedding of Miss Meredith Mouse and No Matter How Many Windows, the story of women in her family which won the 2011 Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing from the Working Class Studies Association. Her poetry has been adapted for the stage and performed in Ohio, New York, Texas, Kentucky, West Virginia, California and Edinburgh, Scotland. Her new play, Foxglove Canyon, was first performed in Akron for Summa Healthcare s Humanities conference under the direction of Russell Zampino. With the support of Hiram College s Center for Literature, Medicine and Biomedical Humanities, her nursing poetry has been adapted for the stage and performed by Verb Ballets, Cleveland, Ohio. As a community affiliate of Youngstown State University s Center for Working Class Studies, she frequently treats working-class issues. She teaches writing workshops in schools, universities, community centers, cancer support groups and assisted living facilities. She has received writing fellowships from Bucknell University, the Ohio Arts Council (1997, 2007), and Vermont Studio Center. She lives with her husband in Newton Falls, Ohio. Judy Waid, who does the cover art here, is retired after forty years of nursing. A graduate of Trumbull Memorial Hospital s School of Nursing, wife and mother, she has always pursued her love of art. She studied at Kent State University and the Cleveland Institute of Art and has received several art awards. The Ohio Nurses Association commissioned her to design medallions based on nursing personalities and historical moments in nursing now in museums, universities, private collections, and in the textbook Nursing, The Finest Art. Her portraits of prominent women in the Warren-Youngstown area are well known and on display at the Warren Trumbull County Public Library and the Harriet Upton House. A member of the Trumbull Art Gallery and its portrait group, she lives with her husband in Howland, Ohio.

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