Nova: In March 2021, a small hardcover book landed on shelves. It was called Poems of Healing. It had no poems about COVID-19, no references to lockdowns or masks or social distancing. And yet, it became one of the most quietly resonant books of the pandemic era. Today, we're exploring this anthology and the remarkable editor behind it, Karl Kirchwey.

Nova: : A poetry anthology about healing that doesn't mention the biggest health crisis in a century? That seems almost counterintuitive, Nova. Why would that book resonate right then?

Nova: That's exactly the question that makes this book so fascinating. Karl Kirchwey, a poet and professor at Boston University, began assembling this collection in 2018. He had experienced several minor illnesses himself and had long believed that poetry could provide what he called a unique distillation, both of suffering and of comfort. He had no idea that within months, a global pandemic would make his anthology feel almost prophetic.

Nova: : So it was accidental timing. But there must be more to it than that. What actually went into this book?

Nova: More than a hundred poems, spanning twenty-seven centuries. From Sappho in ancient Greece, writing in the seventh century BC, all the way to contemporary poets like Danez Smith and Alissa Valles. Every poem touches illness, injury, recovery, or healing, whether physical or spiritual. The Washington Post reviewer called some of the comfort in this book ice-cold. It is not Chicken Soup for the Soul. It is something much more honest.

Nova: : Ice-cold comfort. I'm intrigued. Let's dig in.

Nova: Before we get into the poems themselves, we need to understand the person who curated them. Karl Kirchwey was born in Boston. He earned his BA from Yale and his MA from Columbia, and he has lived all over the world, Quebec, London, Switzerland, Rome. He is the author of seven books of poems, with an eighth titled Good Apothecary forthcoming.

Nova: : Good Apothecary. Even his own book titles circle around the theme of healing.

Nova: Exactly. He won the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his 1998 collection The Engrafted Word was a New York Times Notable Book. He directed the famed 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York for thirteen years, then served as arts director at the American Academy in Rome. Today he is a professor at Boston University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program.

Nova: : So this is someone who has spent his whole life inside poetry, both as a maker and as a curator. That matters for an anthology like this.

Nova: It matters enormously. Kirchwey has deep relationships with poets across generations. For this book, he put out what he called an all-points bulletin to friends, colleagues, and fellow poets. He started with his BU colleagues. The anthology includes work by three-time US poet laureate Robert Pinsky, by Rafael Campo, who is both a poet and a practicing physician at Harvard Medical School, and by Alissa Valles, a recent BU graduate at the time. Kirchwey even included his own poem, Blood and Light, dedicated to a family member who died young.

Nova: : So the book is personal for him. He is not just an academic assembling texts from a distance.

Nova: Not at all. He writes in his foreword that the project grew out of his own experiences with illness. And the arc he chose for the book mirrors what any patient goes through. Four sections: The Illness, The Diagnosis, The Remedy, and The Healing. He wanted a structure that would follow, in his words, an arc of change. It is a clinical architecture applied to poetry.

Nova: : A clinical architecture. That's a fascinating way to think about it. Almost like a course of treatment.

Nova: Let's walk through that architecture. The first section, The Illness, plunges readers into the experience of being unwell. And right away, this is not a book that says everything will be fine. Take John Donne's Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse. Donne wrote this in 1623 while he believed he was dying of spotted fever. He literally imagined himself as a map spread out on a sickbed, with his doctors as cosmographers studying his body.

Nova: : That image is stunning. A body as a map being read by strangers. It captures something true about serious illness, the way your body stops feeling like yours.

Nova: Exactly. And then you have Emily Dickinson's The Soul has Bandaged moments. She writes about the soul being wrapped up, unable to move, unable to feel. It is a poem about the odd formal feeling that comes with overwhelming pain or grief, when you go numb. Sylvia Plath's Tulips appears in this section too. Plath was in a hospital after an appendectomy, and she writes: I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses and my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons. Complete surrender of identity.

Nova: : That line about giving your name and your clothes and your history away is so precise. Illness does that. It strips you.

Nova: And the book does not flinch from that. The Diagnosis section then introduces the moment of naming what is wrong. There is Lucille Clifton's poem Cancer, W. H. Auden's Miss Gee, and Eavan Boland's Anorexic. These are not poems that offer platitudes. The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski's Try to Praise the Mutilated World appears here. It is probably the most famous poem in the collection. It circulated widely after 9/11 and the New Yorker printed it on the back page of its first issue after the attacks, alone on the page, somber as a tombstone, as the Washington Post reviewer put it.

Nova: : And yet it is a poem that asks us to praise. Even as it acknowledges refugees going nowhere and executioners singing joyfully.

Nova: That tension is everything. Zagajewski does not deny the mutilation. He simply insists that praise is still possible alongside it. That is the kind of healing this book is after. Not cure, not erasure, but something more complicated.

Nova: The third section, The Remedy, is where the poems begin to imagine treatment, relief, the possibility of getting better. This is where you find Rafael Campo's Antidote. Campo is a unique figure, as I mentioned, a Harvard-trained physician who is also an acclaimed poet. His poems here come from actual clinical experience. He has written about phone messages from patients, about the daily work of doctoring.

Nova: : That dual perspective must bring something rare to the anthology. Someone who has been on both sides of the stethoscope.

Nova: Absolutely. And the Remedy section also includes the ancient Persian poet Rudaki, writing in the tenth century: You want to give harmony to the world? The world will not accept harmony from you. Even the remedy section refuses to promise too much. Then we arrive at The Healing. And here, something shifts. Alissa Valles contributes a poem called Discharge, about leaving the hospital, being drunk on a sudden pour of time. D. H. Lawrence's The Ship of Death appears here, which is actually about accepting mortality as a kind of healing, building your own ship of death, as he puts it.

Nova: : Wait, a poem about building a ship of death appears in the healing section?

Nova: Yes. Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it! for you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you. Lawrence wrote this in the final year of his life, dying of tuberculosis. The point is that healing does not always mean cure. Sometimes healing means reconciliation, acceptance, making peace with what cannot be changed. Gwendolyn Brooks' when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story appears here, as does George Herbert's The Flower, a seventeenth-century poem about spiritual rebirth.

Nova: : So the arc of the book is not illness to cure. It is illness to some kind of transformation.

Nova: Precisely. Kirchwey said something crucial about this. Given the distortions that illness inflicts on our lives, we must commemorate our losses somehow. Remembering not only our losses, but also what we love in the world is one way of doing this. Poetry, he said, functions as a charm, a cure, a prescription for remembering. That is not about erasing pain. It is about holding it and finding meaning within it.

Nova: : A prescription for remembering. That reframes what poetry can do. It is not a painkiller. It is more like a diagnostic tool that helps you see clearly.

Nova: Let's talk about the moment this book entered the world. April 2021. More than half a million Americans had died of COVID-19. Millions worldwide. Isolation had become a way of life. And here comes this small 240-page volume, part of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series, priced at just under sixteen dollars.

Nova: : The Pocket Poets series has a long history, right? These are those handsome little hardcovers with the ribbon markers and the cloth bindings.

Nova: Yes. Everyman's Library Pocket Poets has been publishing these compact anthologies since the 1990s. They are designed to be carried, held, given as gifts. Poems of Rome, which Kirchwey also edited, came out in 2018. Poems of Healing feels almost designed for a bedside table. And the physical object matters. Acid-free cream-colored paper, decorative endpapers, a silk ribbon marker. It is meant to be a companion.

Nova: : Something you can hold when everything feels intangible.

Nova: Exactly. Boston University hosted a virtual reading to celebrate the publication in April 2021. More than a dozen poets and translators participated. Robert Pinsky read. Rafael Campo read. Translators read poems in their original languages and then in English. Kirchwey invited each reader to curate their own selections, hoping to represent all four sections. The event was free and open to the public, streamed on Zoom, because that was the only way to gather in that moment.

Nova: : And the book received thoughtful critical attention, not just as a COVID-era product, but as a serious literary anthology.

Nova: The Washington Post review by Mark Athitakis was particularly insightful. He noted the risk that healing-themed books can devolve into feel-good sentimentality or Chicken Soup for the Soul territory. But he found that Poems of Healing resisted that. He wrote that true healing is rare in the book, and that what emerges instead is something more valuable, companionship in suffering. He quoted a line from C. P. Cavafy's poem in the collection: Bring your drugs, Art of Poetry, they numb the wound at least for a little while.

Nova: : At least for a little while. That honesty is what makes the book work. It is not pretending to fix anything permanently.

Nova: So what do we take away from Poems of Healing? First, that Karl Kirchwey accomplished something genuinely difficult. He curated a collection that spans millennia and continents, from Sappho to Danez Smith, from ancient Greece to contemporary America, and he gave it a structure that feels inevitable: illness, diagnosis, remedy, healing. That arc mirrors our own experiences with sickness and recovery.

Nova: : And he did it without resorting to easy answers. The comfort in this book is ice-cold, as that review put it, but it is real comfort. It does not lie to you.

Nova: Second, the book reminds us that poetry has always been a response to human fragility. John Donne in the 1620s, Emily Dickinson in the 1860s, Sylvia Plath in the 1960s, Lucille Clifton in the 1990s. Every generation faces illness, every generation turns to language to make sense of it. This anthology is a record of that enduring impulse.

Nova: : And third, the timing matters. Even though Kirchwey began this project before COVID-19, the book arrived when millions of people were confronting mortality, isolation, and loss in ways they never had before. It became a companion for a moment that desperately needed companions.

Nova: I think Kirchwey himself put it best. Poetry can provide a unique distillation, both of suffering and of comfort. That is what this book offers. Not escape from suffering, but a language for it. A way to hold it, examine it, and perhaps begin to move through it.

Nova: : So for listeners who might be curious, Poems of Healing is available through Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, published by Penguin Random House. It is 240 pages, a small hardcover you can slip into a bag or keep on a nightstand. And if you are wondering where to start, try Adam Zagajewski's Try to Praise the Mutilated World, or Emily Dickinson's The Soul has Bandaged moments, or Seamus Heaney's Miracle.

Nova: Or just open anywhere. That is the beauty of an anthology like this. Each poem is a small world. Each one offers a different medicine.

Nova: : This is Aibrary. Congratulations on your growth!