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No Obvious Distress - poems
“Reading Amanda Quaid's No Obvious Distress I was variously electrified, distressed, startled and silenced. When faced with serious illness, she writes about language and love. Every poem praises - or damns - change, and so every poem is about time and all its promises and removals. Deft, daring, devastating and delightful, this is a debut that establishes a voice as crafty as it is clear.” - Pádraig Ó Tuama, author of Kitchen Hymns, host of Poetry Unbound
“Astonishing. These poems glimmer with a white-hot beauty that is hard won, and that sings”
- Sarah Ruhl, playwright of Eurydice
“Striking, surprising, and technically excellent, the poems resonate way beyond their endings”
- Roger Robinson, author of A Portable Paradise (T. S. Eliot Prize)
Patient is a normal appearing woman in no obvious distress.
On an ordinary day, out with her three-year-old in the park, Amanda Quaid received a life-changing call - the back pain she had been living with for years was actually a rare and aggressive form of cancer. In an instant, life became a series of sterile rooms, medical charts and body-altering treatments which completely upend Amanda's marriage, work and family life as she knows it.
Poetry became a lifeline for Amanda, a form to organize the chaos and pain of day-to-day life into order and beauty. In inventive and arresting poems that explore desire, marriage, motherhood and mortality, No Obvious Distress is a powerful memoir-in-verse about Amanda's unique experience. But it is also a tender, witty and universal collection that asks how we can continue to live and love in times of uncertainty.
After working in theater for most of her life, Amanda Quaid left acting in 2021 when she was diagnosed with chondrosarcoma. In 2023, as a way to work creatively with illness, she began writing poetry. That same year, one of her first poems, “Patient and Daughter Appear Closely Bonded,” was awarded the Bridport Prize, one of the UK’s largest awards for a single poem, selected by Roger Robinson.
Subsequent poems have been named finalists for the Philadelphia Stories’ National Prize in Poetry, twice longisted for the UK’s National Poetry Competition, shortlisted for the 2024 Bridport Prize, and published or forthcoming in Rattle, Broadsided, LONESOME, Book XI, DMQ Review, Bombay Gin, Tendrils, Metphrastics and Dead End. An erasure self-portrait made from her doctor’s notes won the Brooklyn Poets’ Yawp Poem of the Month and was the runner-up for Poem of the Year. Her debut collection, No Obvious Distress, a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, is forthcoming with John Murray Originals in July 2025.
She was raised in New York City, where she works as a dialect coach and lives with her husband and daughter. She founded and co-edits the ekphrastic poetry journal Metphrastics.
Select Poems
