TEBOT BACH
20592 Minerva Lane
Huntington Beach, CA 92646 714-968-0905
info@tebotbach.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tebot Bach is honored to publish One Breath by Catharine Clark-Sayles.
ISBN 978-893670-31-0
$14 US/Canadian
One Breath is a collection of poems written by a doctor after twenty years of medical practice. The poems move from childhood awareness of suffering and follow through the medical school experience and into stories of patients as they and their doctor struggle to understand the complexity of illness. There are poems of the anatomy lab, the emergency room and the garden.
Meditations on death and the moral dilemmas of each decision become more urgent as the author faces her own illness. There is humor, often black, as the doctor deals with the strange failings of the body. The language of medicine is fused into lyrics of house calls and nursing home rounds and infused with all of the love and grief of caring for and losing a patient. Clark-Sayles discovered only after many years of trying to be a scientist that it is possible and even necessary to be also a poet to make sense of illness and loss. Since medical training offered little experience in poetry and much encouragement to write as non-musically as possible she has spent the last fifteen years tuning her ear by reading daily doses of poetry and writing as often as possible. She continues to practice internal medicine and geriatrics. Poems written on the back of prescription pads are common in the pocket of Catharine Clark-Sayles’ white coat as she moves from hospital to office to nursing home. After twenty years of training and practice of geriatrics she recovered a childhood love of poetry as a way to find meaning in the stories presented by her patients. Over the last
two decades she has worked to undo the habits of dry clinical reportage for a more lyrical narration while finding the beauty of medical language.
After a military-brat childhood of frequent moves across the United States, she attended college and medical school in Colorado then moved to Northern California in 1979 for medical training as an Army physician. Better as a doctor than as a soldier she chose civilian life and a private practice specializing in older adults.
Dr. Clark-Sayles has learned poetry by reading and working with mentor poets Margaret Kaufman, Robert Sward and David St. John. She has had many poems published in medical journals and anthologies. One Breath is her first book. The title comes from advice she was given as an intern: in an emergency take one breath and then another.
