The Undying

Picador
Paperback
320pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781250757982

Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

Anne Boyer

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“Boyer’s book, ambitious in scope, is honed to a precision
that feels hard-won. The politics of illness—how the profit
motive determines life and damage and death; how victim
blaming is enshrined; how social norms can disable and kill—have rarely been limned with such clarity and grace.”

—Lidija Haas, Harper’s Magazine

A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck, this catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. More than just a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying also explores the experience of sickness from the digital age back to ancient Rome, weaving in dream diarists, John Donne, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, corporate lies, pro-pain “dolorists,” the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of the ubiquitous pink ribbon while also diving into the long line of literary women writing about their own illnesses. The Undying will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show the contemporary United States to be a place both desperately ill and, occasionally, perversely glorious.

© Cassandra Gillig

Anne Boyer is a poet and an essayist who lives in Kansas City. Her honors include the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, a 2018 Whiting Award in nonfiction/poetry, and the 2018-2019 Judith E.Wilson Fellowship in poetry at Cambridge University. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including the 2016 CLMP Firecracker Award-winning Garments Against Women and a book of fables, essays, and ephemera titled A Handbook of Disappointed Fate.