Author(s): Sandra Steingraber

Poetry | Health & Healing

In response to a promotional ad claiming that the number of people who have survived cancer could now fill the city of Los Angeles.

And the nonsurvivors fill the Pacific Ocean, and the Grand Canyon, and the whole of Antarctica. They fill our silences. An they fill our mouths when we try to speak. They inhibit vast and magnificent cities. The nonsurvivors remember Los Angeles as just a dot on the map: a stone's throw in the sticks where everybody knew each other's business. And then there is the wife of the man in Illinios: he's been walking the streets for thirty years because the space of her body fills every living room of every house he sees...

Coming from the intimate space of a cancer patient's hospital bed to the national sacrifice zones of atomic bomb test sites, Sandra Steingraber's Post-Diagnosis sets out to find Ground Zero in order to tell "the whole story of what happened".

The author--a gifted young poet, a survivor of cancer in her twenties, a biologist with an environmental bent committed to cancer activism--writes about hope, and renunciation, desire and determination.