Survivor’s Notebook

A collection of prose poems that chronicles the family life of two cancer survivors.

Dan O’Brien’s powerful companion to Our Cancers catalogs the recovery of a cancer survivor, whose wife has recently survived her own cancer, as he returns to his daily life while raising a young daughter. This prose-poem sequence is a true survivor’s notebook, using photos and the tools of memoir to evoke how disaster can constellate our past, present, and future.

In his poems, plays, and nonfiction, Dan O’Brien has explored, as he says in a 2023 interview, “how trauma shatters identity, and in its aftermath we reconfigure and rewrite, as it were, the story of who we were and are and maybe will be.” In highly personal poems reminiscent of dramatic monologues, as well as shorter lyric fragments, the protagonist reconsiders the people and places he knew before his illness, including his estranged family and others with cancer. While looking back he moves forward again, resuming his career as a writer and teacher, revisiting Ireland, and making a kind of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There is a confiding and at times comical tone in these poems as O’Brien awakens to the delights, absurdities, and wonders of existence, and as he and his wife work through the aftershocks of their trauma toward a deeper love.

With text and the poet’s photographs, Survivor’s Notebook shows how we go on, with resilience, gratitude, and joy, when “the emergency’s elsewhere” now.

REVIEWS

“In wielding the tools of memoir, O’Brien illuminates the traumas and triumphs of two cancer survivors to profound effect. This complement to O’Brien’s 2021 collection Our Cancers is as inspiring as it is skilled.”

—New England Review

“The playwright and poet lays bare the bones of his life, giving us entrance to the reality of his struggles in the space of a few perfectly chosen words.”

—America Magazine

“In Survivor’s Notebook, through the more flowing, capacious prose poem, there is a less precipitous feel, more an expansive mood of intensive searching, and, often, an onward rush of packed mental busyness and racing novelistic flights . . . The prose poem is a good choice for [O’Brien’s] roaming quest, as it allows him to channel free-flowing, often turbulent, thoughts and feelings. Rather than a sense of completeness to each piece, the reading sensation is more in medias res throughout . . . Each lucid fragment is a part of the whole shattered mosaic of restless living.”

—Nicola Healey, Wild Court

“Like the Old Masters, [O’Brien] understands how our human songs are ‘made melodic with pain.’”

—Amanda Newell, Plume

“Part celebration, part extrication, fans of personal stories about imperfect lives will enjoy this brave and bittersweet book.”

—Jesi Bender, Exacting Clam