Body of Diminishing Motion Poems and a Memoir

Named a Category Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Awards (2015)!

This collection of poems and memoir is the second title from Laurel Books, CavanKerry’s Literature of Illness imprint which features poetry and prose that explores the many poignant issues associated with confronting serious physical and/or psychological illness. Sidney speaks to the author’s experiences living with multiple sclerosis for four decades, as well as her personal legacy as the daughter of a strong-willed Holocaust survivor. Body of Diminishing Motion will speak to anyone who has been touched by illness and refused to succumb to its power.

Joan Seliger Sidney is writer-in-residence at the University of Connecticut’s Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. She also facilitates “Writing for Your Life,” an adult writing workshop. Her dream-came-true job was teaching creative writing at the Université de Grenoble, France. Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Louisville Review, Kaleidoscope, and Anthology of Magazine Verse &Yearbook of American Poetry. She has received fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems published in 2003 were nominated for a Pushcart Prize XXIX. She has three published books: The Way the Past Comes Back (The Kutenai Press, 1992), Body of Diminishing Motion (CavanKerry Press, 2004), and Bereft and Blessed (Antrim House, 2014). She lives in Storrs, Connecticut, with her husband. Their four adult children are thriving.

Even the saguaros,
split by lightning
or disease, die in thick armor.
Even the cactus
can’t count on its red blooms.

For thirty years I denied
the day might come
when to walk across a room
would be too far.

Now shriveled,
my leg muscles will not
bear my body.

A climber’s legs
once, they stretched
across rock faults, hiked
the hard way up a dike.

I slid the rope
through my fingers,
rappelled my body
rock to rock.

Sidney’s marvelous book . . . has not only turned illness, specifically multiple sclerosis, into a proper subject for poetry, it has transformed disease in general into something much larger than itself, something that embodies the quintessence of poetry and the fundamental struggle for balance between inspiration and control that all writers face . . . this is a book that most definitely was needed in the world.
— Pamela S. Wagner, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Sidney has MS and has confronted the gamut of practical and interpersonal dilemmas that can ensue. In this collection, she helps us experience her personal contest with this harsh illness. It is profoundly true that each person with MS has a unique story. It is equally true that there are common themes and Sidney’s voice skillfully illuminates many of these. Yes, this is a collection that will resonate most strongly with those who are familiar with MS or have lived with chronic illnesses, but the real beauty is that she has created satisfying literature that can be enjoyed on its own merits.
— Bruce R. Ransom M.D., Ph.D.

Joan Sidney braids the challah of her own nerve cells diseased by MS and the emotions and sufferings imprinted in her by genes which were tossed in a pit in Zurawno, worked and starved to death in Auschwitz. If healing is the ultimate goal, then the speaker must acknowledge that healing begins in the hellish, shadowy past of her ancestors . . . These poems and memoir are all of a piece. They trace Joan Sidney’s journey to “live fully with happiness, love and suffering.” She must live with MS and the past until they are “as much a part of me as my breasts and belly—not an enemy to hate, fight against, and try to destroy.” This is, indeed, the wisdom of the body that grows in spirit even as it diminishes.
— Robert Cording, Ph.D.

December 2004
123 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.5
$14
ISBN 978-0-9723045-2-8
LaurelBooks