For poet and nurse practitioner Cortney Davis, the truth revealed through poetry is similar to what she has experienced in the heightened and urgent dramas that occur in health care—those suspended moments in which a dying heart might be revived or unbearable suffering relieved. We are vulnerable, her poems say, and we are dependent on one another—on the ways in which we care or fail to care for one another, in how we love or fail to love. In poems that are sensual, emotionally searing, and yet unfailingly tender, Davis shines a caregiver’s light on the most intimate details of the human body and the spirit within—how the flesh might betray, how it endures, and how ultimately it triumphs.

Nursing 101 -- Selling Kisses at the Diner -- Mornings We Rolled Pills into Fluted Cups -- Surgical Rotation -- Nurse's First Autopsy -- Apology to the Woman in Room 23 -- Stoned -- Intubating the Corpse -- Angel of Mercy -- Falling Temperature -- All Night, Lightning Flared Silently -- Heroics -- Teaching CPR -- Women's Clinic -- Dark Marks -- Hooked Up -- Alchemy -- Circulating Nurse Enters the Operating Room -- Waking -- It Was a Good Year for Dreams -- Becoming the Patient -- Ants Reprieve -- Nurse's Pockets -- Patient Tells about Her Suffering -- Diagnosis HIV -- Follow-Up: Women's Clinic -- Astronomy -- I'm Afraid of the Brief Empty Space -- Visiting the Lightning Struck -- Distracted by Blackberries -- On Call: Splenectomy -- Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter -- Vocation of Illness -- There Are No Poems at Hospital Management Meetings -- Killing the Nurse in the House -- I Want To Work in a Hospital -- My Evidence -- Twelve Thousand Years Ago -- Hospice -- Taking Care of Time -- Finding What You Didn't Expect -- First Night at the Cheap Hotel -- Snake Charmer.