The Story of the Body

A major new anthology of poems about illness and resilience—eighty-two essential poems spanning four centuries, edited by New York Times best-selling author Meghan O’Rourke

Illness is one of humanity’s most universal experiences, yet it is often endured privately and in silence. When Meghan O’Rourke—poet, editor, and author of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness—fell ill in her thirties, she turned to poetry for company and consolation. The Story of the Body, which emerges from those years, is a landmark anthology of eighty-two of the most vital and indelible poems in English about illness, pain, and recovery. Spanning four centuries, from John Donne and Emily Dickinson to contemporary poets such as Danez Smith and Victoria Chang, it traces how poets have made meaning from the suffering body—and, in doing so, taught us how to live.

The poems gathered here name what so often goes unnamed: they give language to shock, to pain, and illness’s changes. Organized around the arc of illness—crisis and diagnosis, clinical encounters, caretaking, metaphysical reckoning, and resilience—these poems refuse euphemism. They capture the terror and tenderness of the sickroom, the love of caregivers, and the clarities of survival. If illness can isolate us, these poems insist on the opposite: that a vulnerable body is our deepest source of connection to one another. This is a book for patients, clinicians, students, and anyone seeking to understand life in a vulnerable body. By turns piercing, funny, and profoundly moving, these poems illuminate our most intimate hours—and remind us of what it means to be alive.