Poems that take the teeth out of cancer

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: reviewer Chelsea Boes tells us how one Christian author used poetry to “fight the good fight of faith.”

CHELSEA BOES: 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. In her book Now I Lay Me Down To Fight, one poem leads to just one more and then another until suddenly you find yourself reading the final poem in the book.

Hutson notes in one of the small essays punctuating her poems, “If you’ve had cancer, you know you’re never free of it.” But Now I Lay Me Down To Fight is not just 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 Christian theology stays intact. Hutson wrangles the fallenness of the world in her own body. She trusts in the love of God through her suffering. But she doesn’t preach at the reader. She writes, “My days were measured before / Everybody’s always are.”

A warning: the slim book feels lightweight, but the content is justifiably heavy. Hutson doesn’t shy away from the physical aspects of serious illness. Some readers may struggle here.

But at the same time, Hutson may also make you laugh. She writes this line about the first encounter with her oncologist—“Hello, so thankful to meet you: Can you save my life?” She wonders: Should she wear unicorn socks to her mastectomy? Her truth telling is electric with detail. Somehow, it takes the teeth out of cancer. And so does her worldview. The reader feels ready to ask, “Cancer, where is thy sting?”

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.”

On the hard path God called her to, Hutson did a poet’s work well. She forces our eyes toward beauty. She writes, “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.

I’m Chelsea Boes.

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