What do you do if you wake up one day to find your breasts are insanely on fire with a vicious invader who plans to kill you unless you take the chemo journey without so much as a promise of survival? Because you are young, a wife and a mother with hopes to live for other stories, you have no choice. You take the journey. And if you are a poet, you ‘walk this poisonous way’ hoping, praying, negotiating, and writing all the while.
In this collection Katy moves through the halls of medicine and the corridors of pain to find she is only a ‘tiny speck of glory, barely sparking,’ but one carried in the arms of Jesus. Out of the crucible of cancer comes this rare collection of poems sure to be a comfort to many who have cussed, fought, and cried their way through a terrifying diagnosis or any of the heartaches and griefs common to humankind.
Katy has survived inflammatory breast cancer. For now. I consider this one huge blessing because she has been right up there, ranking as one of my best besties. I recommend her poetry not because I love her, but because it is good. Her work is everything honest, angry, grace-filled, and sometimes, even funny.
Book recommended: Now I Lay Me Down to Fight: A Poet Writes Her Way Through Cancer by Katy Bowser Hutson (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press; 2023); 96 pages; illustrated by Jodi Hays; Foreword by Tish Harrison Warren.
Photo credit: taken by the author with her iPhone.
