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SPEAKER 1: The reason that I wrote that was that there's a long history of breast cancer in my family, and my mother was diagnosed in her 30s and then two of my sisters in their 30s. So that meant that there was a gene.

But even more significant to our family was that both my mother and my sister died on Easter. And it was 16 years apart. But that, of course, suggested that there were maybe psychological linkages between my mom and my sister that I would have had no access to. And I did that kind of an exploration.

SPEAKER 2: What did poetry do for you in the aftermath of your mother's death and your sister's death and your diagnosis of your other sister?

SPEAKER 1: I think that it was the first time for me that I felt like I needed to write these stories. And it probably in my younger years, in my 20s when I was writing, I had read some work that was maybe cathartic or people felt like I need to talk about these problems.

And I was almost a little jaded about that because I was very young and I had a lot of ego. So I never would have envisioned that I would have done that type of work. But when it came right down to it, I hadn't written for eight years.

It was almost a year after my sister had died. And I needed to tell the stories. And I felt like I needed to do it for my sister. And that might be naive, but my sister was extremely talented and she had so much promise.

And, of course, I was so sad to have lost her. But I felt like I needed to do something to take a page out of her life and to preserve something about her. And in fact, some of the poetry I went into, the work that she had been doing, she was a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins. And the work she was doing was fascinating.

And I took some of that and ended up writing about it because I think that if she had been able to go on, she would have done amazing things. And of course, then for me, it was putting my stake in the ground that like, this is the way I will never allow this person to ever be forgotten. And the same is true with my mom.

The one thing that I've seen with the losses that I've gone through is, people never want to go. And that's the one thing-- that's the only thing you can really do for them is say you will never be forgotten. And it was my way of making sure that, that would happen.

SPEAKER 2: Would you like to read one of your poems?

SPEAKER 1: Yes. Yeah, definitely. There's a poem, it's called Formica Road. And Formica Road, it's actually a real road. It's outside of Tomah, Wisconsin. It's just a little bit East. It's out in the cranberry bogs there.

And it was one of those places that I went through all the time. My grandmother lived in Oshkosh for years. I drove back and forth all the time. And I would go back and forth with my sister Maggie, of course, when she was sick and cross this. And I just love that name, Formica Road, because it's such an interesting little piece of Americana. So this is Formica Road.

I take Route 21

to Oshkosh all year through

quilt terrain, horse-

drawn Amish buggies

parked in the driveway

of the shop closed

on Sundays near

the spent stone farmhouse,

the girl who sold me

hickory nuts with her

St Bernard, through

heaping winters, led

only by my love

for the moon. When

you died they put us

on a detour. Well.

When you were sick I tried

stitching you one square--

Tumbling Blocks in

velvet from sliced-up dresses

on sale, by hand each

dark diamond starred

clean, scar-sterile

gauze-filled pocket--

I didn't finish. Detour

ran through good sod

land, prime source

Of baler twine. I watched

a girl waiting to cross.

21, huge aluminum

mailbox, and her hip

out, her elbow cocked;

she thought the boy, the

boy, might pass in his

Trans Am. Wave, girl.

All these passages back--

Tomah, Coloma, Wautoma,

the driveway I tried to reach

my star of wonder and got

a swaddling babe, gurneys,

IV lines, tiles and

skin, the smell of hot

Styrofoam at seven, eight

separate lines, Sweetie,

feeding your heart directly.

Nobody sings much now

when I cross Formica Road.

Could we have sewn in my own

heart? It might seem like

the middle of nowhere out here

but this way is a shortcut,

the truncated gravel just scars.

SPEAKER 2: Wow, that's pretty powerful.

SPEAKER 1: Thank you.

SPEAKER 2: And it starts with an experience you had with your sister and ends up with a description, obviously, of her going through chemo, I would guess.

SPEAKER 1: Yes she actually had a bone marrow transplant at Johns Hopkins. And it was right at the tail end of they're doing bone marrow transplants. So some of those descriptions are literal.

SPEAKER 2: And how do breast cancer survivors, cancer survivors and their families react to you when you present poems like this?

SPEAKER 1: It's actually been really rewarding for me to go out with the book because I've been able to do a couple of benefits for the race for the cure last year. And the race for the cure is coming up again this year on Sunday in Minneapolis.

And my sister, who is now almost a four-year survivor, lives in Steamboat springs, Colorado. And there's a real good breast cancer project there. And so I've been able to donate proceeds for the book and that type of thing.

And mostly what women have told me is that it makes them-- the book makes them feel strong because it validates their experience. But I always have to caution people that it's written from the experience of the caretaker. And someone who has never had the diagnosis.

So I'm cautious about that because, of course, the stories in here end with two sad stories with my sister and my mother. But that's not-- that's only a piece of the story. And I think that, that can be a little overwhelming for people to see that those losses were there. I tried to build in a lot of the redemption. The poem Easter, I actually separated it into five sections. And they're based on the five stages of grief.

And the last one, of course, is acceptance. And so I really wanted that to come through in that poem that at the end, people do go on and you do learn from it and you learn how to honor what you have lost. But for the most part, I think people have been positive and have felt that there was a strength in being able to see, yeah, that, that is what I experienced too.

SPEAKER 2: And what have you learned about yourself and the potential that you face with this gene by writing these poems?

SPEAKER 1: I think that it has helped me work around that because that is really scary. And I'm the big sister. I'm the oldest of the four girls. And so as my two sisters who have been diagnosed were younger than me, you can feel like the clock is ticking. And so being able to really address it sort of head on, I think has been really important to me so that I don't feel that I'm denying what could be out there.

SPEAKER 2: Could I say there-- and I can't think of the poem right now, but at least in one or two of these, there really is a sign of defiance that you're shouting at. The threat, I think.

SPEAKER 1: Yeah. And that's probably in the poem Easter, it's based on those five stages of grief. And one of them, you know, is bargaining. And bargaining to me is the most interesting of stages.

And I think that there's a lot of survivor guilt in the book. And especially when it's a gene. And there's this, obviously, there's this linkage. And even the way Maggie talked about breast cancer, the whole time growing up after my mom had gone, I guess, made me think really hard about what those linkages were.

Was there something genetic in her that informed her that was something that was going to be happening to her? And I think that that's one of the only things I've been kind of able to do about it, is to be very involved with my sisters and involved with their treatments and to just try to make sure that I'm pretty confrontational about it. Bargaining doesn't really get you anywhere. It's just a very human response.