In your wake the usual detritus:
Half-smoked cigarettes, pages folded down,
brushes shedding silver hair, empty bras.
Here and there we witness visitation,
a closet open, air displacing air
received with hmmms, an eyebrow raised. No one’s
lingered comatose, limp and unaware,
or crossed the borderline from is to was
but Helen, four, who drowned while being born,
29 minutes without oxygen
until she breathed. She knows that other world,
imagines you transforming in cocoon,
new limbs and abdomen, damp wings unfurled
to soar beneath anthropomorphic moons.

Dramatic and intimate, the poems in Does She Have a Name? trace the journeys of two women—one middle aged, the other her infant granddaughter—through near-mortal encounters with medical crises. Both survive their trials, passing from life to death and back again; both face wrenching, unpredictable challenges; both emerge from years of therapy, made whole but alone, changed by experience in apparent and invisible ways.

Moving from a neonatal intensive care unit’s urgent ministrations to the patient work of neurologists and speech pathologists, told from the perspectives of parent, child, husband, and witness, and exploring questions of disability, difference, and the calculated value of human life, Does She Have a Name? is an affecting, provocative book of poems.