Books
Discover Amy’s latest book, The Most Potent Weapon, and her other books An Otherwise Healthy Woman and The Geography of Kitchens, all currently available for purchase.
The Most Potent Weapon
The poems in Amy Haddad’s The Most Potent Weapon read like “enlightenments from life on the road,” to borrow from Paul Theroux, for those who journey with an end-stage or chronic illness. With a rare insider’s view of the world of health care from the dual perspectives of nurse and patient, Haddad reveals courage, frailty, grace, and humor in poems grounded in clinical authenticity.
Advance Praise for The Most Potent Weapon
With an unflinching eye, Haddad offers an intimate portrait of illness, vulnerability, and hope. It’s a beautiful and necessary collection that reminds us of the power of language and attention, and what it means to care and be cared for in the face of uncertainty.
Jay Baruch
Author of Tornado of Life: An Doctor’s Journey Through Creativity and Constraints in the ER
“Feel deeply what you can carry,” Amy Haddad advises, and in The Most Potent Weapon she demonstrates how. Haddad’s readers will feel deeply the weight, rage, fear, dark humor, wisdom, and scars of the cancer experience.
Kathleen Flenniken
Author of Dressing in the Dark
Haddad propels us on an immersive and harrowing journey through cancer detection, treatment, and all that follows. Her most potent weapon is an arsenal of meditative and illuminating tropes, offering balms of science, pragmatism, and hope. A deeply moving collection.
Johanna Rian, Ph.D.
Retired Program Director, Mayo Clinic Lavins Center for Humanities in Medicine and Assistant Professor of Medical Education, Mayo Clinic Alix College of Medicine
What is a weapon? In this startling collection, Amy Haddad explores this most fundamental question by exploring another question: what happened to you? We witness her hands searching the landscape of her chest and read her list of questions as she endures the baffling shame wrought by aloof caregivers and the glare of red-eyed lasers. Her breast is reduced to a cancer flower, a sliver, a smear onto slides. She shouts her story while cradling us in the tender place where the elbow bends, in that cleft between those who declare…and those who whisper. Gratefully, we listen.
Stacy R. Nigliazzo
Baylor College of Medicine
A huge Thank You to Amy Haddad for writing these stunning and informative poems:
“. . .three in five victims will die.” She takes us by the hand through the underworld of breast cancer: airless waiting rooms, breast exams, failed and redone surgeries, and even an
interview with Metastatic Breast Cancer, “. . .I am bold/ not easily discouraged. . relentless.” Then she leads us into the War Zone where “collateral damage is often necessary.” The poet, a quiet witness, employs a cast of many: patients, families, doctors and nurses. Everyone who has experienced breast cancer or knows someone who has (all of us!) will learn and be comforted by these poems.
Barbara Schmitz
Author of Always the Details
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