“Memoir of the Month. Funny, moving, wise and constantly surprising.”
Amanda’s debut poetry collection is now available in the UK, and for US preorder.
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
“*****”
“Astonishing. These poems glimmer with a white-hot beauty that is hard won, and that sings.”
“Striking, surprising, and technically excellent, the poems resonate way beyond their endings”
“Deft, daring, devastating and delightful, this is a debut that establishes a voice as crafty as it is clear.”
“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.”
After working in theater for most of her life, Amanda Quaid began writing poetry in 2023, as a way to work creatively with illness. 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 highly commended for the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry & Medicine, named a finalist for the Philadelphia Stories National Prize in Poetry, twice longlisted for the UK National Poetry Competition, shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and published or forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Rattle, Poetry Is Currency, Mom Egg Review, Broadsided, LONESOME, Book XI, DMQ Review, Bombay Gin, Tendrils, and Metphrastics. An erasure self-portrait made from her doctor’s notes won Brooklyn Poets Yawp Poem of the Month and was runner-up for Poem of the Year. Her debut collection, No Obvious Distress, a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, is out now with John Murray Press and was named Memoir of the Month by The Independent.
She was raised in New York City, where she works as a dialect coach, teaches at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, and lives with her husband and daughter. She founded and co-edits the ekphrastic poetry journal Metphrastics.
Photo by Josiah Bania
