“Suturing”: Love, Death, and Perfection’s Limits

Of all the so-called “received forms” in English, the sonnet is the most familiar (and perhaps the most frequently published in JAMA). In “Suturing,” the predictable sonnet structure, and its harkening across centuries to the likes of Shakespeare and Donne, gratifies readers while simultaneously challenging us to compare love (traditionally its chief subject) with its flip side, mortality. The decidedly gruesome yet paradoxically beautiful descriptors of the practical steps of preserving the bod...