Samuel Tongue

It's a lively continuing exploration and that writing and continuing to write is how to live, is to continue living.

And another of the aspects that was key to this feeling, overall feeling, was that there was a community, again, inside this poem.

So we're in the chemo room,

But there are other patients there.

There are Jenny, who's asked that when people, and again, eminently quotable, Jenny, who says when people ask if she's out of the woods, she tells them she'll never be out of the woods, says there is something lovely about the woods.

And that kind of humor and pathos that comes in just feels real.

So there's another patient in there, and then there's another patient's wife who was full of so much hope, she looked like a firework above her husband's chair.

We felt, again, as we were working our way through the poem, that Gibson is just so good at writing stories

honestly, and about the absolutely singular aspects of going through this process, but going through it with a community.

So it's particular, it's singular, but it's also communal.

And constantly avoiding the risk of settling onto one emotion or one form of understanding.

and allowing that pathos and humor and ridiculousness and absurdity and infinity into what is now unfortunately quite a mundane experience and situation.

We were also very struck by how the poem that proceeds in couplets ended on a single line.

It again feels like, I mean, you can overread it perhaps as a, yeah, the poet has decided to end on this single line as a mark, a kind of epitaph or a mark of, this is the message you're supposed to head out of the poem with.

But it was just very gentle.

It was a gentle kind of Finnish denouement to the poem.

And it came after the couplet, Will the afterlife be harder if I remember the people I love or forget them?

Either way, please let me remember.

And that helped us to find a conclusion to the poem where it's not as simple as a binary, it's non-binary.

It becomes a either way and either or, please let me remember, please let me still have that connection.