No Obvious Distress

“One of 2025’s best books. Funny, moving,
wise and constantly surprising.”
- The Independent

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 upended Amanda's marriage, work and family life as she knew 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.

Praise for‍ ‍No Obvious Distress

*****
Memoir of the Month and one of the Best Books of the Year

— The Independent

“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

“Astonishing. These poems glimmer with a white-hot beauty that is hard won, and that sings.”

— Sarah Ruhl

“Striking, surprising, and technically excellent, the poems resonate way beyond their endings.”

— Roger Robinson

“No Obvious Distress is not simply another confessional poet’s first collection, another memoir of love and loss ... The recursive and repetitive language enacts the speaker’s bafflement at a reality no longer working as it should.”

— Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., The Harvard Review

“By turns hauntingly plainspoken and coursing with the joy of language, Amanda Quaid gives us language for living with an unimaginable diagnosis—as well as with a family, sexual desire, a sense of humor, longing and love.”

— Katie Farris