“Pills You Can’t Stomach”: Poetry, Medicine, and Resisting Metaphor

In most lyric poetry, of which “Pine, Arizona” is a fine example, such artful devices as metaphor are typically present. Yet when the lyric’s subject is medical, the poem can become an argument between beauty and reality. Lovely details, such as the fading colors of the evening sky and the ethereal singing of unseen coyotes, verge on metaphor yet resist its full embrace, as the spell is broken by a more unpoetic list of stark medical concerns: “The chemotherapy injections//you get in your abdome...