Doctor my eyes

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Six years ago, the Department of Medicine at New York University started the Bellevue Literary Review with the idea of showcasing work on health and healing, illness, mortality and death. Since then, the review has published such authors as Rick Moody, Abraham Verghese and Amy Hempel, all of whom are featured in ‘The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review’ (Bellevue Literary Press: 320 pp., $16.95 paper), edited by editor in chief Danielle Ofri and the journal’s staff.

There’s a lot of great, and unexpected, writing in this collection: Floyd Skloot’s poem ‘First Steps,’ which describes his first walk without a cane in 15 years, or Rafael Campo’s vivid ‘Silence = Death.’ But my favorite is Jan Bottiglieri’s ‘Having an MRI/Waiting for Laundry,’ which, in the space of a single paragraph, manages to evoke the way time can collapse around us, bearing us back and forth between the present and the past.

‘I am wondering,’ Bottiglieri writes, ‘how a childhood that seemed almost miserable at times can be looked back upon with such an aching love for even the smallest detail. Because the noise here inside the MRI machine is so common, so familiar, that within seconds I am leaning against the wall near the back door of my mother’s house, circa 1975, listening to the green Maytag spin.... It is 1975, so I have never been in love or made love to, never almost died from cancer, never married, never carried and bore my son, never had this MRI. It is 1975, and I am just a girl waiting for laundry, trying to help her mother.’

David L. Ulin