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From Teva Harrison, the award-winning author and illustrator of In-Between Days, comes a powerful work of poetry and art in which she continues to explore what it means to live with metastatic breast cancer.
In this remarkable, frank, and gut-wrenching mix of words and images, Teva continues on her journey, grappling with what it means to live with metastatic breast cancer. She plunges deep into her inner world, shadowing the progression of the disease. Reality takes on sharp edges: the swell of cancer and its retreat with chemo. Her inner corporeal reality versus her outer manifestation of health, vitality, and femininity. Holding fast to the great love of her life, while preparing to leave him behind. Contemplating who she was before cancer, and who she is now.
Starkly honest and wholly profound, Not One of These Poems Is About You distills life to its essence. Teva Harrison continues to gift the world with her clear-eyed insight and her open heart.
“Chiaroscuro is, in art, the treatment of light and shade used to create depth and dimension. Teva’s poems have that play of light and shadow. They beam such love and the very whole of life, its essence at the very moment when her own life is receding. She asks us to lean in and listen, and though her voice may be a whisper, it can still shatter glass. Her words hold duality. They are deeply personal, profoundly universal. They are profane and sacred. She is not with us, but she is with us. The poems, each word painstakingly chosen, are polished stones fetched up on the shores of our lives. I am so grateful for this collection: to hear her voice again now, and always.” — Shelagh Rogers
“Not One of These Poems Is About You is an intimate consideration of the oceanic, immense nature of endings and the tidal ever-afters left for the living. Passionate and defiant in the face of metastatic cancer, Harrison’s poems ‘stand/alone/with [their] own truths, acute/supercharged.’ These poems shine as she did: with fierce lucidity and everyday magic.” — Dani Couture
“Not One of These Poems Is About You is a radical act of witness — a testimony to being alive with terminal cancer. Teva Harrison’s rawness and vulnerability, her lucid eye and tired body become, here, vital sites of reckoning. This is her offering — to say, it was like this, to say, live, to say, remember. Buy this book. Gift it to others. Love while you can.” — Aislinn Hunter
“This achingly honest and tender collection is a precious gift from an artist who savoured life more fully than anyone else I know. From intimate moments shared with a lover, to the fear and isolation of illness, these poems are Teva’s candid and generous invitation to join her on her journey from life into death. Not One of These Poems Is About You is one of the few books I can think of that makes me a little less afraid of dying, and a little less afraid of losing those I love.” — Tannahill Jordan
“Incredibly, [Teva Harrison] used her diminished time to create a heart-rending depiction of disease and its effects, complete with many tiny, beautiful drawings of flowers, insects, stars, and birds. Facing death, Harrison still found beauty in the world and wanted to share it.” — Quill and Quire
“In Not One of These Poems Is About You, author and artist Teva Harrison has documented the beauty, fullness, and magic of life and human connection in an honest, vulnerable, and tender collection of poems and line drawings.” — Globe and Mail