The Most Potent Weapon, by Amy Haddad

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The poems in Amy Haddad’s The Most Potent Weapon read like “enlightenments from life on the road,” to borrow from Paul Theroux, for those who journey with an end-stage or chronic illness. With a rare insider’s view of the world of health care from the dual perspectives of nurse and patient, Haddad reveals courage, frailty, grace, and humor in poems grounded in clinical authenticity.

The chapbook examines everyday life that is filtered through a cancer diagnosis. The poems highlight metaphors commonly used to describe the divides between the ill and well including differences in language, war imagery, and expectations regarding feminine beauty in form and language that are at once subtle, relatable, clear, and often jarring. This chapbook is like a series of postcards along the way on a trip to a strange land in which Haddad bears witness to unexpected, and at times, unbearable experiences encountered there. Anyone on a similar trip will find a willing companion in the poems in this book.

Amy Haddad started her career as a nurse working in mental health settings, medical/surgical nursing, and home care. Presently, she is a professor emerita at Creighton University. She is the author of the chapbook The Geography of Kitchens (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and An Otherwise Healthy Woman (Backwaters Press, 2022), that was a winner of the American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year in 2022. Her poems have appeared in journals including: Aji Magazine, Persimmon Tree, DASH Literary Journal, Oberon Poetry Journal, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Months to Hours Poetry Journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Glimpse Poetry Magazine, and Abandoned Mine. She and her husband live in a 100-year-old log cabin in the middle of a park in Omaha, Nebraska.