a toast to illness
a toast to illness is direct poetic testimony from Corrado Paina’s extended affliction with cancer. Although he survived, he delivers no comforting tale of recovery, but a frank and unflinching account, piece by piece, of a harrowing ordeal that would very likely be fatal. Poem after poem authentically registers the harshest impacts of pain and distress, powered by jolts of mordant irony, black humour, and a darkly compelling imagination. Here is work of rare honesty and courage, as well as of writerly art.
