Sun in Days: Poems

In a confessional and plainspoken narrative mode, O’Rourke (author of the memoir The Long Goodbye) delves into memory and “the body’s failure” in her third collection. She addresses her own chronic autoimmune disorder directly: “You were a disease without name, I was a body gone flame,/ together, we twitched, and the acupuncturist said, it looks difficult,/ stay calmish.” Other times, O’Rourke addresses her reader, talking about her illness with deadpan delivery: “Let’s put it this way: My sickness in some sense is natural to me.// So what is the natural old me I yearn for?” The collection’s centerpiece, the 73-part poem “A Note On Process,” weaves the gymnastics classes of her able-bodied past, (“velvety feel of the floor mat, the bounce of the fiberglass bars,”) with her more recent illness, during which she recalls, “I was a low pilot flame of myself.” At these different levels of physical strength, the pace of time also shifts. For someone suffering from an illness, “seconds arrive as if in delay,” yet a youthful past recalls “cool blue/ pockets of time.” While O’Rourke hones in on her illness, the poems that transcend her physical situation are the most memorable. (Sept.)