Terminalia

by Daniel Menaker

A collection of poems by author Daniel Menaker, published by The Portal Press. In January 2020, Daniel Menaker former New Yorker fiction editor, Random House editor-in-chief, and author of The Treatment, among many other books received a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and the twenty-four poems collected in TERMINALIA were written over the course of Menaker's diagnosis and treatment. The collection chronicles his long contention with the truth : that The illness you re fighting / And to which you will lose was Written, like this. / But uneditable, inevitable. Lauded by Janet Malcolm as a true comic artist, Menaker reflects on the long arc of an extraordinary life in verse that's at once mournful and remarkably, even insistently funny. Writing from the imaging slab, the argot of the docs and lab reports, and the haze of painkillers, his poems playfully register the humorous and rhetorical possibilities latent in medical and anatomical terminology. Against the sickness circus of pandemic-era New York City, Menaker's account of his private experience of illness stays attuned to both joy and its twin brother, mourning.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

DANIEL MENAKER began his career as a fact checker at The New Yorker, where he became an editor and worked for twenty-six years. A former book editor, Menaker is the author of six books; he has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Parents, Redbook, and many others.

Reviews

[Liara Roux · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love end of life poetry. This brought to mind Seamus Heaney’s Clearances, written shortly after the passing of his mother. Menaker’s dark humor might be off putting to many, but I loved it. great contemporary poetry

[Miranda · Rating 4 out of 5]

One day I walked into McNally Jackson in New York (my favorite bookstore in the world), as I had 10 minutes to browse before meeting my friends for dinner. I came upon this book of poems, read the premise and the first poem, and then had to leave for my appointment. A week later I came back to the bookstore for the sole purpose of finishing the book. I stood there for 30 minutes, completely absorbed, and finished it in one standing.