Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Co-winner of the competition for the 2014 Outriders Poetry Program selection, this work is Schepers' first published book of poetry. He describes it as a series of prose poems, elegies in name, that interrogates scientific and medical jargon. Loosely following the hospitalization of a dying patient, the book tracks the bombardment of this specialized language keeping the patient, rather than the disease, at bay.
Schepers finds the dying in a mesh of technologies, administrative structures, and small and large betrayals of the body. His elegies are for these things that stand around a single, blazing fact. They are unsparing. This is moving.--Joe Hall
A BUNDLE OF CAREFUL COMPROMISES is both hilarious and heartbreaking. it took my breath away.--kathryn l. pringle;
In this cancer journal of fifty- one wit-strewn elegies to everything from bedpans to bed sores, abstraction comes to the aid of the entrapped body through the doors of mathematics, medical terminology and odd alignments of facts. The book's mordant, searching struggle against nullity is indeed a collection of 'careful compromises' between the body and its attackers, with the loser somehow prevailing through the amazements of language.--Ann Goldsmith
