Metastatic Metaphors: Poetry, Cancer Imagery, and the Imagined Self

How do metaphors shape and reflect patients' experience of cancer? How can repeated immersion in challenging poetry affect our understanding of cancer and other diseases? This essay addresses these two questions through an exploration of the varied and sometimes contradictory metaphors crafted by poet and seven-time cancer patient Judy Rowe Michaels. Although cancer is often regarded as an enemy intrusion to be eradicated, it is an illness in which the threat to life comes from within the self. Michaels's metaphors complicate the relationship between an embodied self and the cancerous cells the body produces, presenting multifarious responses to living with cancer. Defying expectations of a linear trajectory from symptom to diagnosis to treatment to recovery, these metaphors provide a means to understand the changing emotions; the changing relationship to illness, to wellness, and to self; and the changing status as patient (symptomatic, diagnosed, in treatment, in remission, in recurrence) that characterize the lived experience of cancer—and of other recurring or chronic diseases. Examining these poems demonstrates the value for practitioners, patients, and families of honing a poet's mode of understanding, as a vital complement to the mode of thinking that currently drives health care.