A poet and a fighter

When we get cancer, we need poetry. Katy Bowser Hutson convinces us of this with the poems she composed during her own staredown with death. Open Now I Lay Me Down To Fight: A Poet Writes Her Way Through Cancer (InterVarsity Press 2023) and you’re hooked: One poem leads to just one more and then another until suddenly you find yourself reading the final poem in the book.

“If you’ve had cancer, you know you’re never free of it,” Hutson notes in one of the small essays punctuating her poems. Yet Now I Lay Me Down To Fight is not merely for people with cancer, or even for those in remission. The book is for anybody living in a mortal body and “for whom the bell tolls.”

When Hutson gets her cancer diagnosis as a young mom, reality hits hard, but her theology stays intact. Hutson wrangles the fallenness of the world in her own body and trusts in the love of God through her suffering. She comes to terms with her grim diagnosis without preaching at the reader. (“My days were measured before / Everybody’s always are.”) Her openness and ­commitment to deeply specific truth-telling manage to take the teeth out of cancer. When we sit with the poems of a person deciding whether to wear unicorn socks to a mastectomy, cancer no longer looms as the vague terror each of us harbors at the edge of our minds. To borrow Hutson’s words, she’s “running down fear with beauty.”

A book like this could easily grow depressing, but this one makes you laugh. Hutson writes this line on the first encounter with her oncologist—“Hello, so thankful to meet you: Can you save my life?” Cancer takes Hutson’s hair, eyelashes, and breasts, attempting to “flatten her” and make her “into a one-dimensional character.” But, she writes, “I have things to do / I’m a beauty bearer / where you, cancer, copy furiously, / I fumblingly create. / You cannot uncreate me.” Regarding her surgeons noticing her unicorn socks, she quips, “I hope they see that I like my body and I’d like to keep it.”

On the hard path God called her to, Hutson did a poet’s work well. She forces our eyes toward beauty, noting, “Crazy as it sounds / A benefit of cancer / Is that people tell you they are glad you are alive.” After spending this little book with her, we’re gladder to be alive too.