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Sun in Days: Poems
From the acclaimed poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke comes a powerful collection about the frailty of the body, the longing for a child, and the philosophical questions raised when the body goes dramatically awry. In formally ambitious poems and lyric essays, Sun in Days gives voice to the experience of illness, the permanence of loss, and invigorating moments of grace. Wresting a recuperative beauty from one’s days, O’Rourke traces an arc from loss and illness to the life force of pregnancy and motherhood. Along the way, she investigates a newfound existential awareness of all that vanishes. This is O’Rourke’s most ambitious book to date: unsentimental yet deeply felt, and characterized by the lyric precision and force of observation for which her work is known.
From “Idiopathic Illness”
What can be said? I came w/o a warranty,
Stripped of me—or me-ish-ness—
I was a will in a subpar body.
I waxed toward all that waned inside.
From “Idiopathic Illness”
What can be said? I came w/o a warranty,
Stripped of me—or me-ish-ness—
I was a will in a subpar body.
I waxed toward all that waned inside.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published September 19, 2017
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About the author
Meghan O'Rourke
16 books245 followersMeghan O’Rourke is the author The Long Goodbye: A Memoir (Riverhead Books, 2011), and the poetry collections Once (W. W. Norton, 2011) and Halflife (W. W. Norton, 2007). A former literary editor of Slate and poetry editor of The Paris Review, she has published essays and poems in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Poetry, and other venues. She is the recipient of the 2008 May Sarton Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She splits her time between Brooklyn, NY, where she grew up, and Marfa, TX.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
November 21, 2017
Accessible and approachable, Meghan O'Rourke's poems cover the quotidian of past and present, pregnancy and pain. Pain? Yes. A whole section devoted to pain that the whitecoats cannot diagnose, so if you are one of the legions out there with mystery diseases (going around in this chemical age), you might especially like this section.
Here's a taste of her work:
"Poem of Regret for an Old Friend"
What you did wasn’t so bad.
You stood in a small room, waiting for the sun.
At least you told yourself that.
I know it was small,
but there was something, a kind of pulped lemon,
at the low edge of the sky.
No, you’re right, it was terrible.
Terrible to live without love
in small rooms with vinyl blinds
listening to music secretly,
the secret music of one’s head
which can’t be shared.
A dream is the only way to breathe.
But you must
find a more useful way to live.
I suppose you’re right
this was a failure: to stand there
so still, waiting for—what?
When I think about this life,
the life you led, I think of England,
of secret gardens that never open,
and novels sliding off the bed
at night where the small handkerchief
of darkness settles over
one’s face.
Here's a taste of her work:
"Poem of Regret for an Old Friend"
What you did wasn’t so bad.
You stood in a small room, waiting for the sun.
At least you told yourself that.
I know it was small,
but there was something, a kind of pulped lemon,
at the low edge of the sky.
No, you’re right, it was terrible.
Terrible to live without love
in small rooms with vinyl blinds
listening to music secretly,
the secret music of one’s head
which can’t be shared.
A dream is the only way to breathe.
But you must
find a more useful way to live.
I suppose you’re right
this was a failure: to stand there
so still, waiting for—what?
When I think about this life,
the life you led, I think of England,
of secret gardens that never open,
and novels sliding off the bed
at night where the small handkerchief
of darkness settles over
one’s face.
December 17, 2017
A heart-wrenching exploration of loss and pain.
O'Rourke writes of her longing for the child she never had yet imagine in great detail. She also confronts her illness, a sickness whose causes are unknown and therefore can not be treated effectively. She doubts at times the realness of this energy sapping sickness that no one understands (one acquaintance says dismissively, "Everyone is tired.") not even her.
The poems examine the construct of the self, the "I" we all imagine being and how that is attacked, even dismantled by the experience of illness.
All this is done with a combination of lyrical essays and beautifully wrought poems.
O'Rourke also wrote the incredibly moving memoir of her mother's death, The Long Goodbye which moved me to tears and remained with me long after finishing the last page (something I value highly in a book; so many disappear immediately upon completion). This volume is satisfying on many levels: emotionally as well as the formal beauty of the writing and images. O'Rourke's confrontation with the experience of loss (hopes for the future, bodily strength) is deeply moving and entirely unsentimental.
Strongly recommended.
O'Rourke writes of her longing for the child she never had yet imagine in great detail. She also confronts her illness, a sickness whose causes are unknown and therefore can not be treated effectively. She doubts at times the realness of this energy sapping sickness that no one understands (one acquaintance says dismissively, "Everyone is tired.") not even her.
The poems examine the construct of the self, the "I" we all imagine being and how that is attacked, even dismantled by the experience of illness.
All this is done with a combination of lyrical essays and beautifully wrought poems.
O'Rourke also wrote the incredibly moving memoir of her mother's death, The Long Goodbye which moved me to tears and remained with me long after finishing the last page (something I value highly in a book; so many disappear immediately upon completion). This volume is satisfying on many levels: emotionally as well as the formal beauty of the writing and images. O'Rourke's confrontation with the experience of loss (hopes for the future, bodily strength) is deeply moving and entirely unsentimental.
Strongly recommended.
September 24, 2017
I loved, loved, loved this poetry collection! I seem to have gotten out of the habit of reading poetry as of late, but something about this book spoke to me. I now want to read everything O'Rourke has written! Divided into three parts, the author seamlessly weaves together an enchanting array of poems dealing with childhood, mothers, children, and illness. Historical figures (ex: Van Gogh) come out to play, too, allowing the author a chance to make them come alive in the reader's mind, played out against the backdrop of the author's life. This book is a marvel. Thank you to Edelweiss and W. W. Norton for providing me with an advance copy.
February 22, 2023
At some point, perhaps the publishers will do a boxed set of Meghan O’Rourke’s two books: The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness and her poetry collection Sun in Days. Personally, reading the former first added considerable comprehension value to the second.
I would even go so far as to say Sun in Days created new value. Briefly, The Invisible Kingdom recounts the author’s decade-long battle with autoimmune disease and a tick-borne virus, and O’Rourke laments her challenge with finding the right language to adequately describe her illness. Well, reframing some of her circumstances in poetry and “lyric essays” addresses the challenge in fine fashion.
Besides her frequently-debilitating illness, O’Rourke’s poetry captures profoundly personal yearnings—pregnancy and motherhood, and resolution of the puzzlement with a malfunctioning body. In “Unnatural Essay,” for example, she echoes a notion: “I had a glimmer of what it used to be like—but I also had adapted to circumstance” as a contemplation of what it might be like to learn to live with chronic illness rather than recover from it.
As is usual with poetry, what I like jumps up and grips me at first reading. Other verse dances at the edge of vague understanding or defies fathoming even on third readings, “Mistaken Self-Portrait as Meriweather Lewis,” for example. Nevertheless, the whole collection is a thought-provoking easy read. I’ll include a favorite, “Mortals,” in its entirety.
In my mind I made you failproof: I pictured
the crib, the delicate hair, even the babysweet breath—
I counted what I knew of the body, and copied it out
diligently.
As they grunted and levered you
From the space I’d made
under my ribs
I saw I was the room
you had to leave to be yourself.
Emptily reaching out to hold you—
I would even go so far as to say Sun in Days created new value. Briefly, The Invisible Kingdom recounts the author’s decade-long battle with autoimmune disease and a tick-borne virus, and O’Rourke laments her challenge with finding the right language to adequately describe her illness. Well, reframing some of her circumstances in poetry and “lyric essays” addresses the challenge in fine fashion.
Besides her frequently-debilitating illness, O’Rourke’s poetry captures profoundly personal yearnings—pregnancy and motherhood, and resolution of the puzzlement with a malfunctioning body. In “Unnatural Essay,” for example, she echoes a notion: “I had a glimmer of what it used to be like—but I also had adapted to circumstance” as a contemplation of what it might be like to learn to live with chronic illness rather than recover from it.
As is usual with poetry, what I like jumps up and grips me at first reading. Other verse dances at the edge of vague understanding or defies fathoming even on third readings, “Mistaken Self-Portrait as Meriweather Lewis,” for example. Nevertheless, the whole collection is a thought-provoking easy read. I’ll include a favorite, “Mortals,” in its entirety.
In my mind I made you failproof: I pictured
the crib, the delicate hair, even the babysweet breath—
I counted what I knew of the body, and copied it out
diligently.
As they grunted and levered you
From the space I’d made
under my ribs
I saw I was the room
you had to leave to be yourself.
Emptily reaching out to hold you—
October 21, 2017
Good collection of poems dealing with her struggles with infertility and an autoimmune disorder that had the doctors stumped.
February 24, 2018
A stunning and necessary exploration of life with a chronic illness. In her essay ‘Why Does Literature Have So Little to Say About Chronic Illness’ (http://lithub.com/why-does-literature...), O’Rourke mourns the absence of writing on a topic that affects so many of us. She addresses it both head-on and in extremely subtle ways here, but address it she does - and the result is empathetic, and moving, and spoke to my very core as someone who has not seen herself and her illness represented accurately (or at all) in any art form before this. I am endlessly grateful to Meghan O’Rourke for making me feel seen and understood, and imagine I am far from alone in this sentiment.
October 7, 2017
Spur of the moment espousing,
in any form is optimum, unpracticed
and reaches highest stratospheric.
This book is an overly obvious construct,
less the oceanfront view.
Ego tangential,
Poetry suicides itself famously,
form will never equal me,
unpredictable drop dead dangerously.
Chris Roberts, Patron Saint of Whooping Cranes
in any form is optimum, unpracticed
and reaches highest stratospheric.
This book is an overly obvious construct,
less the oceanfront view.
Ego tangential,
Poetry suicides itself famously,
form will never equal me,
unpredictable drop dead dangerously.
Chris Roberts, Patron Saint of Whooping Cranes
May 19, 2020
I bought this volume of narrative poems at a used bookstore in NYC while there for a neurosurgeon appointment for my oldest daughter. Very rarely have I read poetry that explores and expresses the suffering of chronic illness, loss and grief without personifying the pain. The author’s writing is so true it’s as if she never considered an audience at all. True poetry I will return to again and again.
April 13, 2019
One of the shelves in the new books section of our library is devoted to poetry. Mainly the small publications...the chapbooks and slim volumes that poets publish but also the occasional larger collection. I have decided to pick a random selection off this shelf once a month to familiarize myself with a new poet.
Meghan O'Rourke's Sun in Days: Poems is the first book I chose and what a good choice it was. I liked the cover first of all and the first couple of poems hooked me almost immediately. These are very personal poems about regret, dissatisfaction with herself, with her body, poems about chronic illness and pain and feelings of looking at herself as if she were on the outside looking in and poems about loss.
A couple of favorites...the eponymous poem, Sun in Days....a poem of childhood memories, some better than others, memories of her parents, melancholy, bittersweet....
Mnemonic...My favorite lines are, "What have I done with this year of living? I fretted & fanged, was a kind of slang of myself." I love this last line...reminds me of 2017.
A Note on Process...which begins with the author watching a gymnast on Youtube, all the while, comparing herself to the gymnast and the medical processes she is going through as a patient with a chronic disease being treated in a hospital.
Looking at her bio and bibliography I noted a memoir called A Long Goodbye about the death of her mother that I put on my to-read list and now have home from the library. I am looking forward to starting this book soon.
Meghan O'Rourke's Sun in Days: Poems is the first book I chose and what a good choice it was. I liked the cover first of all and the first couple of poems hooked me almost immediately. These are very personal poems about regret, dissatisfaction with herself, with her body, poems about chronic illness and pain and feelings of looking at herself as if she were on the outside looking in and poems about loss.
A couple of favorites...the eponymous poem, Sun in Days....a poem of childhood memories, some better than others, memories of her parents, melancholy, bittersweet....
Mnemonic...My favorite lines are, "What have I done with this year of living? I fretted & fanged, was a kind of slang of myself." I love this last line...reminds me of 2017.
A Note on Process...which begins with the author watching a gymnast on Youtube, all the while, comparing herself to the gymnast and the medical processes she is going through as a patient with a chronic disease being treated in a hospital.
Looking at her bio and bibliography I noted a memoir called A Long Goodbye about the death of her mother that I put on my to-read list and now have home from the library. I am looking forward to starting this book soon.
October 22, 2019
Poems about infertility or miscarriage, mortality, ego death, chronic pain, and illness. Meghan writes about having a mysterious illness that no doctors could identify.
While reading about her illness I thought, it must be the grief. This book was published after The Long Goodbye, a memoir about her mother's death. I read somewhere that sometimes our bodies reflect our emotional pain, so our emotional or mental illness can cause or trigger our physical illnesses.
I like how her writing did not sound edited. Reading it takes you through her journey of her illness. The poems did not make much sense individually. I felt more like picking some prose out of those poems.
I like the last poem and how it just faded out with the last line. I like how the individually nonsensical poems seemed to fit the intention of this collection, which was to convey how her illness affected her.
While reading about her illness I thought, it must be the grief. This book was published after The Long Goodbye, a memoir about her mother's death. I read somewhere that sometimes our bodies reflect our emotional pain, so our emotional or mental illness can cause or trigger our physical illnesses.
I like how her writing did not sound edited. Reading it takes you through her journey of her illness. The poems did not make much sense individually. I felt more like picking some prose out of those poems.
I like the last poem and how it just faded out with the last line. I like how the individually nonsensical poems seemed to fit the intention of this collection, which was to convey how her illness affected her.
September 1, 2020
Recommending this to anyone who feels outside their body, who feels captive by their body, who has a chronic illness that struggles to tear them apart from their body, who questions what the term "I" means, who feels they are always at the borderline between living and dying. Would have given it 5 stars if not for this one silly poem that just screamed Rupi Kaur. Otherwise, very precise and evocative imagery and at times playful yet always elegiac.
February 4, 2022
I sought out Sun in Days because I wanted literature that addresses themes of illness. I wasn't sure what to expect and, indeed, it is a very personal collection. First of all, I like O'Rourke's prosody; her syntax and rhythm feels contemporary, natural and honest. It is a collection that looks backwards and forwards, from the vantage point of someone struggling to overcome the physical and mental limitations of her present. The poems are suffused with childhood imagery, seemingly from typical American suburban life: 'the Betamax in the trash,/...Powdered pink lemonade,/ tonguing the sweet grains... liquid thick... We hung out on the Promenade/after school the boys smoking/the security systems in the Center blinking... riding the graffiti'd subways,/flirting, the boys grabbing us calling hey hey/snapping our bras and shame.' (Sun in Days).
Images arise like questions, and are then juxtaposed, and repeated, as if the author is searching for an answer to her mortality, for what it all means, 'What/have I done with this year of living?' She switches from participant in her own life, to an observer, existing in the uncertainty of an undiagnosed illness, 'You were a disease without name, I was a body gone flame,/...I was a will in a subpar body. I waxed toward all that waned inside.' (Idiopathic Illness) and 'I believed less and less/ in the future. All that possibility,/dwindled to a nothing. But.' (Human-Sized Pain).
A particular highlight for me was the long poem, A Note on Process, composed of a series of 72 vignettes, some consisting of only a few words, which in themselves reflect the process of being ill, the varying degrees of fatigue, ability to concentrate, fear and confusion. It reminded me of Richard's Wright composing haiku while he was ill, because it was the only form suited to the restricted capabilities of his now limited body. O'Rourke uses the form of the long poem almost like diary entries, segueing from the biography of a gymnast to her own childhood history in gymnastics, a hinted-at eating disorder, quotes from Keats, Paul Valery, Simone de Beauvoir, Beckett, the contrast between chaos and disorder, the irony of a body attacking itself.
In this context, the poems about her desire for a child act simultaneously as a desire for her own continuance. I found Sun in Days to be an interesting collection, where form, language and subject matter combine in ways that are both imaginative and intriguing.
Images arise like questions, and are then juxtaposed, and repeated, as if the author is searching for an answer to her mortality, for what it all means, 'What/have I done with this year of living?' She switches from participant in her own life, to an observer, existing in the uncertainty of an undiagnosed illness, 'You were a disease without name, I was a body gone flame,/...I was a will in a subpar body. I waxed toward all that waned inside.' (Idiopathic Illness) and 'I believed less and less/ in the future. All that possibility,/dwindled to a nothing. But.' (Human-Sized Pain).
A particular highlight for me was the long poem, A Note on Process, composed of a series of 72 vignettes, some consisting of only a few words, which in themselves reflect the process of being ill, the varying degrees of fatigue, ability to concentrate, fear and confusion. It reminded me of Richard's Wright composing haiku while he was ill, because it was the only form suited to the restricted capabilities of his now limited body. O'Rourke uses the form of the long poem almost like diary entries, segueing from the biography of a gymnast to her own childhood history in gymnastics, a hinted-at eating disorder, quotes from Keats, Paul Valery, Simone de Beauvoir, Beckett, the contrast between chaos and disorder, the irony of a body attacking itself.
In this context, the poems about her desire for a child act simultaneously as a desire for her own continuance. I found Sun in Days to be an interesting collection, where form, language and subject matter combine in ways that are both imaginative and intriguing.
January 11, 2018
3.5 stars
This collection starts off really strong and slowly loses steam, but I did really appreciate it. Rounding up my star rating for overall quality of writing style, even if there were some individual poems I didn't love (the longer poems were a mixed bag for me, but had some nice moments). O'Rourke tackles some really heavy topics (grief, miscarriage/infertility, chronic pain) and makes them very accessible but still illuminates them in a unique way. (A random aside: I've noticed a trend, if you can call it that, in contemporary poetry where there's an introductory poem all by itself, followed by sections of poems. This is probably the third or fourth time I've seen that in the past year, and I never noticed it before! It's kind of an interesting way to set the tone for the collection, but it's kind of hit or miss whether it actually is effective in that purpose...)
Highlights:
The title poem is a nice meditation on youth/childhood and memory.
These lines from "Mnemonic" are just next level poetry, and I bow to their excellence: "What / have I done with this year of living? / I fretted & fanged, / was a kind of / slang of myself." Get it.
"The Night Where You No Longer Live" is a clever musing on the moment of dying.
"Ever" was one of my favorite poems in the collection, and I love the way she uses repetition to reinforce the frustrating, broken record-like quality of grief.
"Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter" has some really poignant observations about existence.
"At Père Lachaise" is just lovely, a bit of melancholy imagination.
Some great lines from "Idiopathic Illness:" "What can be said? I came w/o a warranty. / Stripped of me--or me-ish-ness-- / I was a will in a subpar body. / I waxed toward all that waned."
I usually don't like poems about actual childbirth for reasons, but "Mortals" was the perfect bittersweet description.
I definitely think it's a collection worth checking out, and I will probably read more by O'Rourke in the future.
This collection starts off really strong and slowly loses steam, but I did really appreciate it. Rounding up my star rating for overall quality of writing style, even if there were some individual poems I didn't love (the longer poems were a mixed bag for me, but had some nice moments). O'Rourke tackles some really heavy topics (grief, miscarriage/infertility, chronic pain) and makes them very accessible but still illuminates them in a unique way. (A random aside: I've noticed a trend, if you can call it that, in contemporary poetry where there's an introductory poem all by itself, followed by sections of poems. This is probably the third or fourth time I've seen that in the past year, and I never noticed it before! It's kind of an interesting way to set the tone for the collection, but it's kind of hit or miss whether it actually is effective in that purpose...)
Highlights:
The title poem is a nice meditation on youth/childhood and memory.
These lines from "Mnemonic" are just next level poetry, and I bow to their excellence: "What / have I done with this year of living? / I fretted & fanged, / was a kind of / slang of myself." Get it.
"The Night Where You No Longer Live" is a clever musing on the moment of dying.
"Ever" was one of my favorite poems in the collection, and I love the way she uses repetition to reinforce the frustrating, broken record-like quality of grief.
"Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter" has some really poignant observations about existence.
"At Père Lachaise" is just lovely, a bit of melancholy imagination.
Some great lines from "Idiopathic Illness:" "What can be said? I came w/o a warranty. / Stripped of me--or me-ish-ness-- / I was a will in a subpar body. / I waxed toward all that waned."
I usually don't like poems about actual childbirth for reasons, but "Mortals" was the perfect bittersweet description.
I definitely think it's a collection worth checking out, and I will probably read more by O'Rourke in the future.
May 11, 2020
rly liked this collection!! loved the gymnast long poem about striving, the point of it being itself ("my body... a tool driven by unwavering concentration and desire"), how around competition/bodies that's rarely so pure but still there. it was how i felt watching cheer earlier this year, these beautiful teens trying so hard and purely for something so fleeting and weighed w cultural baggage!! currently trying to learn a back walkover while unemployed living w my mom because
"when I finished [the gymnast's] biography I made a list of what I had 'done' all day. This was a failure, as it should have taken as much time to write as living itself did"
poignant contrast w her own illness/disability. i'm not sure how to write about my relating without sounding trivializing... but i related, and was reminded of this article i can't find anymore about how able ppl struggling w quarantine can learn from disability theory, "crip time" etc
though love loved gymnast poem i generally liked her non-prosey stuff. i like how her tone is conversational without being didactic, linear. images are primary, contradictions ("I am glorious, and wrong" from the meriweather lewis poem, so complex), juxtaposition through form/language -- like slicing fragments together, homonyms -- the stuff that poetry is uniquely good at! my attn span has been shot recently and i've been struggling to read; this was perfect to get back into. i've avoided some poetry that can feel too crisp/tweetlike (didactic, i guess), but i felt like i could let o'rourke's ambiguity wash over me without feeling lost, just sit comfortably in my constantly (these days) foggy head
"when I finished [the gymnast's] biography I made a list of what I had 'done' all day. This was a failure, as it should have taken as much time to write as living itself did"
poignant contrast w her own illness/disability. i'm not sure how to write about my relating without sounding trivializing... but i related, and was reminded of this article i can't find anymore about how able ppl struggling w quarantine can learn from disability theory, "crip time" etc
though love loved gymnast poem i generally liked her non-prosey stuff. i like how her tone is conversational without being didactic, linear. images are primary, contradictions ("I am glorious, and wrong" from the meriweather lewis poem, so complex), juxtaposition through form/language -- like slicing fragments together, homonyms -- the stuff that poetry is uniquely good at! my attn span has been shot recently and i've been struggling to read; this was perfect to get back into. i've avoided some poetry that can feel too crisp/tweetlike (didactic, i guess), but i felt like i could let o'rourke's ambiguity wash over me without feeling lost, just sit comfortably in my constantly (these days) foggy head
November 12, 2019
4.5*
this was just simply mesmerizing. the writing sucked me in, and i feel personally connected to each of the poems. the poems about her mothers death, her depression, her abortion, her illness was all so raw and blazed across the page like a bolt of electricity. there were so many true lines that i was constantly thinking “me too!!!” - she put the right words together in exactly the perfect way. there were one or two instances when i didn’t connect completely to the poems but all the rest of them (to me) were flawless. i can’t speak on O’Rourke herself because i knew nothing about her aside from what’s shared here, but i did love this little book. i’m not sure if rereading it in the future would make this as impactful, so, for the time being: i likes this. a lot. it
this also made me super interested in reading more on meriwether lewis, so there’s that.
this was just simply mesmerizing. the writing sucked me in, and i feel personally connected to each of the poems. the poems about her mothers death, her depression, her abortion, her illness was all so raw and blazed across the page like a bolt of electricity. there were so many true lines that i was constantly thinking “me too!!!” - she put the right words together in exactly the perfect way. there were one or two instances when i didn’t connect completely to the poems but all the rest of them (to me) were flawless. i can’t speak on O’Rourke herself because i knew nothing about her aside from what’s shared here, but i did love this little book. i’m not sure if rereading it in the future would make this as impactful, so, for the time being: i likes this. a lot. it
this also made me super interested in reading more on meriwether lewis, so there’s that.
January 29, 2025
Wow: illness paired with the practice of young gymnasts.
And wowow: "The Body in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" -- I feel like the whole book earned this gorgeous poem. The incantation of the last stanza took my breath.
Ha: I took this book to a "Silent Book Club" meet-up and ended up at a table with a man who said he didn't really read much, nor DID HE BRING A BOOK. I think he was hoping to chat the evening away. But I leant him my copy of Sun in Days. To his credit, he read one of the first poems. He said, "It's so sad." And I think he meant, "It's too sad." Because he stopped after that one poem. And he's right: it's sad, the pain the author writes of, and how terribly it lived in her. But I think it's perfectly sad.
And wowow: "The Body in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" -- I feel like the whole book earned this gorgeous poem. The incantation of the last stanza took my breath.
Ha: I took this book to a "Silent Book Club" meet-up and ended up at a table with a man who said he didn't really read much, nor DID HE BRING A BOOK. I think he was hoping to chat the evening away. But I leant him my copy of Sun in Days. To his credit, he read one of the first poems. He said, "It's so sad." And I think he meant, "It's too sad." Because he stopped after that one poem. And he's right: it's sad, the pain the author writes of, and how terribly it lived in her. But I think it's perfectly sad.
January 4, 2022
A collection of poems about the body, illness, and survival.
from Self-Portrait as Myself: "It is nearly summer, / and summer seems shorter to me / and winter longer and longer, as if life with / its inevitable accumulation of griefs / shifts time the way the myth said: casting a layer / of snow over all our losses."
from Ever: "I know death is absolute, forever, / a guillotine-gutting loss to which we never say goodbye."
from Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter: ": the person who first put a boat / in a bottle / and later wondered / why she's had the impulse / to contain-"
from Self-Portrait as Myself: "It is nearly summer, / and summer seems shorter to me / and winter longer and longer, as if life with / its inevitable accumulation of griefs / shifts time the way the myth said: casting a layer / of snow over all our losses."
from Ever: "I know death is absolute, forever, / a guillotine-gutting loss to which we never say goodbye."
from Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter: ": the person who first put a boat / in a bottle / and later wondered / why she's had the impulse / to contain-"
November 29, 2017
When you read a poem from Meghan O'Rourke's collection Sun in Days, you'll probably know what the poem is 'about,' i.e. the death of her mother or her attempts at having a child, the two main topics she bravely confronts here, and there is plenty of verbal artistry at play in the construction of these conspicuous poems. Likewise, O'Rourke signposts much of the intertextual elements of the collection, whether it be to historical figures or to other works, but that doesn't much take away from their power.
October 11, 2025
I discovered Meghan O’Rourke through a New York Times article, which I ended up rereading a couple of times because I really liked her writing. It wasn’t the ideas necessarily (non-fiction often entices me with its ideas). It was simply the way she put thoughts into words. So I had to go read more of her thoughts. Ergo, Sun in Days.
“Natural / unnatural: even if my sickness were natural it had clearly reached an unnatural point, a point at which ‘I’ denatured.”
It was a beautiful and candid exploration of how one’s mind responds to longterm pain, the fragility of the body.
“Natural / unnatural: even if my sickness were natural it had clearly reached an unnatural point, a point at which ‘I’ denatured.”
It was a beautiful and candid exploration of how one’s mind responds to longterm pain, the fragility of the body.
February 13, 2022
Her writing is understated, yet luscious. It is sort of like biting into a very ripe peach. This collection of poems makes me feel as if my writing, which I feel is minutely similar to hers, may actually have value outside of myself. This only sweetened the joy of reading it. I am glad to have this book in my collection.
March 24, 2024
Many of these poems are beautiful but I didn't connect with them in the way that I would have liked to. I struggle with poetry so when the words don't hit me in the gut like my optimal poetry experience, the collections often don't work well for me. But I can see the talent in O'Rourke's writing and would be open to trying more of her work.
January 18, 2018
It was Okay.
August 15, 2018
This broke my heart in the best of ways. Need to send to a friend who has been struggling of late w/ chronic illness.
July 27, 2019
Especially enjoyed the poems with historical characters.
May 27, 2020
I’m falling asleep majority of the time, though some pieces hit the right spots, I couldn’t ignore most of my feelings when I read this
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October 22, 2020Impressionistic, rhythmic. I adore these qualities in paintings, but am not so sure about them in poetry. Some lines hit me viscerally; some pages left me empty. To rate this would be dishonest.
November 16, 2021
3.5 O’Rourke candidly captures chronic illness & illnesses that are difficult to diagnose. While the subject was personally relatable and handled well, I didn’t find the poems terribly memorable.
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December 19, 2021some of the parts in the poems were really cool with syntax and form and motion, other parts were meh
but that's okay, it was nice
but that's okay, it was nice
September 7, 2022
I LOVED THIS.
I loved how the author described chronic pain and life threatening illnesses and the way she wrote life into artists long dead. It was a beautiful collection.
I loved how the author described chronic pain and life threatening illnesses and the way she wrote life into artists long dead. It was a beautiful collection.
August 4, 2024
3.5 stars
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