On 4 February, World Cancer Day is celebrated to raise awareness and bring together governments, medical experts, and individuals in a bid to improve cancer. 04.02.2022, Sputnik International
Posthumously published at the opening of 2020, Teva Harrison’s collection
Not One of These Poems Is About You documents her experience of her last years of life before she passed away from metastatic breast cancer. She opens the collection with “A Pocketful of Stones”: “I’d like to close the distance between us: where you end, where I begin, / but your skin stops me, I can’t find my way in.” Harrison keeps her reader in a space of closeness and intimacy through her loose rhymes and clear language.
Harrison does not shy away from difficult feelings of self-punishment, resentment, and alienation. She writes in “The Things I Do to Keep Cancer on the Down-Low”: “I’m biting my tongue because this is what I do when you tell me how / nobody would get that I’m dying. / As if the guessing is what matters, not the dying.” As she grimly relates attempts to minimize her illness, she toes the line between wanting her illness to be recognized, to be seen as “sick,�