My Wobbly Bicycle – Meditations on Cancer and the Creative Life
In this book full of pain and joy and raw honesty, Fleda Brown, poet and former poet laureate of Delaware, gives us a real-time account of her cancer diagnosis, chemo and radiation, from the doctor’s phone call to the one-year, all-clear pronouncement.
Now everything’s shifted. We pretend there’s some solidity, some predictability. But being alive is more like riding a bicycle, balancing on two thin tires. Eventually we’ll fall one way or the other, but for the moment, we’re upright. It’s exciting, sometimes frightening.
Brown’s week to week accounts lead to the realization that one needs to face a wall-sometimes the wall of possible death-to see clearly. With great generosity, she allows the reader to come along through the darkness and the light.
About Fleda Brown (Traverse City, Michigan Author)
Fleda Brown’s The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, was chosen by Ted Kooser for his University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. She has nine previous collections of poems. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her memoir, Driving With Dvorak, was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan.
