Books
Discover Amy’s latest books, An Otherwise Healthy Woman and The Geography of Kitchens, currently available for purchase.
An Otherwise Healthy Woman
Awarded first place in the 2022 AJN Book of the Year Awards in the Creative Works Category
Awarded second place in the 2022 AJN Book of the Year Awards in the Professional Issues Category
A clear-eyed look at what it is to be on both sides of America’s health care system, this book of poems offers rare insight into the humanity of the health care professional and the humanity of the patient. Spare and truthful, sorrowful and wise, these poems are necessary in both their deep empathy and their fierce gaze into mortality.
– Ada Limón, Author of The Carrying, Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, US Poet Laureate
“In this book, nurse and poet Amy Haddad shares her vulnerability and her intimate insights on the experiences of various individuals in the health care system: the overwhelmed patient, the grieving family member, and the nurse in all her strengths and imperfections. Her poems take readers to the places of hope, fear, confusion, and clarity we experience when serious illness and death disrupt our everyday reality. They are serious enough to be deeply meaningful without feeling overwhelmingly heavy. While Haddad’s poetry is strong in artistic creativity, its language is also clear and accessible. Her work is subtle, relatable, and sometimes surprising.”
– Hui-wen Sato, MPH, MSN, RN, CCRN, pediatric ICU nurse, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. 2022 AJN Book of the Year, Creative Works Category, First Place.
“This collection of poems is a prescription to heal health care and those who work within it. Through the lenses of nurse, patient, and family caregiver, Amy Haddad brings her unflinching, stalwart gaze to what is broken in health care systems—while simultaneously whispering that compassionate encounters are still possible. Her poetry is mindfulness in motion, a meditation on humanity in health care, profoundly informed by her capacity to hold beauty, frailty, pain, and lament in her grasp. Haddad models courage, empathy, patience, and candor as she examines despair and mortality in equal measure to her fervent embrace of one of life’s truths: that we all have countless opportunities to show up, be present, bear witness, and care.”
– Heather Fitzgerald, DBe, MS, RN, HEC-C, clinical ethicist, senior resilience and wellness consultant, Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, Palo Alto, CA. 2022 AJN Book of the Year, Professional Issues Category, Second Place.
The Geography of Kitchens
Amy Haddad is an exciting voice in contemporary poetry. In a literary landscape preoccupied with formal innovation and artistic novelty, Haddad reminds us that poets are—first and foremost—storytellers. Her enviable command of narrative will render you suddenly and startlingly aware of the transformational work that only the most skillful poetry can do.
– Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly