Cancer – Poetry In Time

Paddling the Sweet Spot

Woman sitting still on a paddleboard on a calm mountain lake.

Finishing Line Press will publish my first chapbook with presales beginning November 24, 2025! Get ready to reserve your copy for a March 2026 release.

Book Synopsis

Laura E. Garrard received a call that many of us fear. She thought she was a healthy person with an injury, and instead she harbored a rare blood cancer called multiple myeloma. In her poetry chapbook, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, Garrard’s lyricism and vivid narratives illuminate living in the “narrow exception of movement” during a time of acute uncertainty. Readers journey with the author and her body through grief, surrender and recovery to plant their hands in earth, swim with dolphins, and run with the salmon. Garrard’s free-spoken style and vulnerable honesty invite readers into her desperation, determination, entreaty and joy. She asks, “What is a human without honor?” Her poignant observations demonstrate how we live and die, simultaneously, and that the present moment is the sweet spot of survival. Garrard’s poetry asks us to destigmatize death and disease in a culture that reveres youth and health, so that we all may live fully. As cancer permeates our communities like never before, this collection is a gift of renewal.

Garrard is a Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist in Bellevue Literary Review’s John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. Her work also appears in TulipTree Review, Amethyst Review, The Madrona Project, Silver Birch, and others. She writes a cancer poetry series, Poetry That Fits, for Penn Medicine’s OncoLink.org.

Endorsements

Laura E. Garrard’s poems are courageous compass-settings for navigating a place of balance and bodily, emotional and spiritual contending. She is fighting a life threatening cancer in language both nuanced and frontal. “Living is precious / The trick is / Not wanting it too much / Not calling death closer.” I finished the book feeling greatly uplifted. Its cargo is a true teaching of how to live daily on the shifting edge of our own mortality and that of those we love.

—Tess Gallagher, author of Is, Is Not

In her chapbook poetry collection, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, the first line of Laura E. Garrard’s poem, “Humbled,” reads I am cleaved by lightning. Garrard navigates a world of illness, the inherent fears of death that are overcome by an instinct for survival, the gripping complexities within the process of healing. The experiences of these poems by Laura E. Garrard reveal that for every corridor of grief there are as many rooms of sustaining light, and that is very human, that’s being much alive.

—Gary Copeland Lilley, poet and author of Raven on the Moaners’ Bench and The Bushman’s Medicine Show

Kudos to Laura E. Garrard for writing honest poems that question the familiar trope of vanquishing cancer, asking: “Why fight against / Death as if it were a foe?” Instead, Garrard listens to her body with compassion, embarking on a journey to bring her life into balance and find that “sweet spot of flow called letting go.” These vivid, sensory poems take us along as she swims in the wake of spotted dolphins, sees messages in barn swallows at play, and listens to alders at the edge of the lake where she finds peace. In the end, we arrive at her epiphany with gratitude for her hard-earned wisdom: “The closer we are to the glass door of death / The freer we are to cornerstone live.”

—Holly J. Hughes, author of Passings, winner of an American Book Award

Photo by Berk Ucak. Top Photo by AscentXMedia.

Take a Stand: Poets Against Hate

On Saturday, Oct. 19, 2-4 p.m., at the Seattle Central Public Library (1000 Fourth Ave, Seattle, WA 98104) poets will read their poems about and take their stands against hate and bigotry.

My contribution will be “Stigmatized and Written Off,” a poem from my full-length (unpublished) cancer poetry memoir. This poem first published on OncoLink.com last month. It touches on the stigma of chronic or terminal disease.

Our culture glorifies youth and often stigmatizes the sick. We don’t deal well with death or the dying either. Oftentimes, cancer patients are dumped by friends and spouses. Also, they can be discriminated against, even by healthcare providers who make global assumptions based on cancer diagnosis. My poem brings these things to light.

Meanwhile, cancer patients are living. This diagnosis is different for each patient with specific circumstances of individuals. Plus, every human dies…we don’t know when. So what’s the deal with this type of discrimination and disempowerment? Let’s get real – disease happens, and to those who take good care of themselves too. A person isn’t a disease nor a disability. A person is a person is a person is a person.

Stigmatized and Written Off

Three close friends of mine opt out.
The last thing said, It’s treatable right? 
Yesterday I read an athlete obit,
Younger man dies in a kayak accident.
So alive was he, everyone in shock,
His abrupt memorial packed no doubt.
But what of those who linger on?

Letting go is a large lesson
In life and death facing.
There’s almost an inward scoff, 
No more energy for outward response
To those unconsciously saying,
Sorry that you’ve got cancer cells
Running all over your body,
Or, So, you’re going to do the
Killing yourself thing to live.
Yes, these things are said.
Surprised? By ignorance,
False confidence, in a culture 
That worships youth and wealth?
Well, I don’t plan to die just yet –
Is that okay with you?
And not every subsequent health issue
Is another cancer—Sorry,
Does this disappoint your need 
To assume that for me it’s all over?

I’m folding myself into poetry batter,
Yes, writing myself in
For whatever time I have to spend,
And with those friends who 
Will have me outlive them.
Dumped due to an impending death –
You’re damn right I care about that.
Aren’t we all headed that way?
Most don’t deny and set me aside.
I thank God for this every day.

By Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2024

Introducing ‘Poetry That Fits’

I am proud that a new poetry series based on my unpublished manuscript is appearing on OncoLink, the Net’s first cancer information website. This site is associated with Penn Medicine and provides information to patients, caregivers and medical staff internationally. One handy feature is a thorough database of cancer meds, what they do and their possible side effects.

My poems appear on their Creative Inspiration page under Patients: Support and in a dedicated section, Poetry That Fits. This title suggests my authentic poetic responses to the situations and emotions I have faced as well as the sardonic irreverent tone that is often necessary. Spirituality and hope are undercurrents yet I don’t hide the grit, the fits.

Here is the link:

https://www.oncolink.org/support/resources/creative-inspiration/poetry-that-fits

My first poem has published this week and five more, one per week, will post in this set. I hope that those with cancer, and those who care for and about them, will find validation, healing, resonance, and further understanding of this unique stressful experience in our culture.

I wrote most of my poems in real time–as incidents, thoughts and emotions unfolded–then edited them into a full-length poetry memoir about the two years following a diagnosis of a plasmacytoma tumor then progression to multiple myeloma. Every time I reread my book, I underline the importance of present-minded living for myself and review the wisdom this challenge has taught me… is still teaching me.

You may relate having navigated a different turnpike. I hope these poems offer solace and company through your own traumatic events and uninvited adaptations. None of us are isolated in our struggles when we share, listen and find common ground.

Reading of “The More Moments I Find Prismatic, the Less Dark My Attic.”

The order of this first segment of poems will appear as follows:

“The More Moments I Find Prismatic, The Less Dark My Attic”
“The First Axe Falls”
“Stigmatized and Written Off”
“Looking Out, Looking In”
“I Don’t Have All the Answers”
“I Can’t Go Back”

If you would like to find out more about my unpublished full-length manuscript, fill out the form below and click, Contact Us. Currently, I am entering my book into contests and submitting it to small presses for possible publication.

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