Susan Gubar, author of Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer
Andrea Werblin Reid refutes the common assumption that “the moment something starts dying / it is no longer living.” Unsparingly focused on the confusion, hopelessness, and anger spawned by an unlucky diagnosis, her poems give us “a closer peek at the ending” for those“alive while dying.” A courageous book.
Airea D. Matthews, Winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry
Reid's To See Yourself As You Vanish is a heart-wrenching work of witness. In this lyrically lush, posthumous collection, a door is opened to an authentic and compassionate contemplation of life and death. And through that corridor, one many of us live in fear of, Reid unflinchingly models writing for her life while braving death's imminence. This is not simply a book of glorious poems but rather a poetic of legacy in which readers inherit Reid's indomitable wit, robust imagination, and interminable curiosity. At once a mirror and a promise, this collection subverts its own title making sure the body's vanishing is not the last word, or ever can be.
Ada Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate; Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
Often with illness narratives, we only honor the stories of recovery, of healing, of 'being cured,' but that ignores the full human truth that mortality is the engine of our existence. With Reid's powerful poems we see a complex and brilliant rendering of the courage it takes to both fight the fact of death, and release to death at the same time. In these poems, I found something I rarely see, the feral urge to survive wrought into unique anthems that praise the dark as equally as the light.