In this collection of vignettes--heartbreaking and often humorous--Nealon explores caregiving as both sacred practice and human risk.
She looks back to her relationship with a father devastated by the early death of her brother; to tending men--some with AIDS, some drunk, some sober--living in Bowery flophouses; to confronting racism; to the quiet instruction of a dog who teaches attention by gazing back.
The essays ask what price we pay when we offer ourselves wholeheartedly to one another, and what it means to remain open to being more than human in a fractured world.
About the Author :
Mary Jane Nealon worked as a nurse for forty-seven years. She retired as the Director of Innovations at a community health center network in Montana. She received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and was the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellow in 2004-2005. She has two poetry collections: Rogue Apostle and Immaculate Fuel, both from Four Way Books. Her memoir, Beautiful Unbroken: One Nurse's Life was published by Graywolf Press. She lives in Wall Township, NJ.
Review :
In her lyrical memoir, Beautiful Unbroken, Mary Jane Nealon asked what care we owe one another. In her new book, a collection of vignettes both exquisitely detailed and widely resonant, heartbreaking and often hilarious, Nealon explores the joys and costs of caregiving. She brings a lifetime of wisdom as a nurse, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a lover, and a poet to the essential question: what does it mean to be human? In the Form of Bread is an astonishingly compassionate book--and so needed right now.
--Suzanne Koven M.D. M.F.A.
In Mary Jane Nealon's gorgeous new book, In the Form of Bread, she recounts her years of working as a nurse as a sacred and audacious training ground where she let beauty and frailty be her lodestones into the realm of forgetting oneself as a way of finding oneself. The essays here can be seen as a primer for what it means to live a compassionate life, but also what it means to live asking the question--as she writes in one essay--"what price do we pay in our own lives when we offer ourselves to each other wholeheartedly?"....If risk is extra life, then, as she says in another essay: "Part of being human is being open to the idea of being more than human." In the Form of Bread is a wonderment and a confirmation that helping others is how we keep the circle of humanity unbroken.
--Michael Klein
