The Hearts Truth Essays on the Art of Nursing Pdf

Cortney Davis

Poesy, Memoir, Creative Non-Fiction

Poet Laureate of Bethel, CT 2019-2022

Welcome to my website!

I am a poet, memoirist, creative not-fiction writer, and a nurse practitioner. While I exercise write about things other than medicine, I'm well-nigh often fatigued to the intersection of health and disease, and to the mysteries of the trunk. In writing, information technology'south possible to view the disease experience from both sides of the sickbed―what we as patients might experience too as what we as caregivers experience. Most of all, I endeavor, in poetry and prose, to understand the complexities of caregiving, that nigh intimate of homo relationships.

In my writing, therefore, nursing becomes a metaphor for how we intendance or fail to treat one another—our families, our neighbors, our lovers. Although both nurses and doctors inhabit the strange universe of illness, expiry, and healing, we bring to that world dissimilar skills and points of view. I write from the nurse'southward vantage point: nosotros accompany patients as they get from disease to recovery; we walk with patients as they journey through death's door. I experience called upon to translate and pass on in some measure the extraordinary lessons I have learned from my patients' lives, and from my own experiences as a patient. When we tell some other's story, we reveal our own as well.

I hope you volition browse through my site, stopping here and in that location forth the style. You will run across my books and too detect links to my writer friends and my favorite journals. There are some writing exercises for nurses (and others) hither too. Delight experience free to contact me. I'one thousand always interested in meeting other caregivers who write, and others who, like me, have been patients.

Daughter

poems by Cortney Davis

These poems are the work of a main, with Davis contrasting the monthly statistical fate of millions of people with COVID-19 with the specifics of her daughter'due south unfolding affliction, "the tragedy inside the tragedy." In her trademark style, the poet'south gaze is direct, attuned to the details of suffering, and at the same time, generous, vulnerable, beautiful, and compassionate. She prays her children volition recall "that they lived/within walls of my flesh / and that life moves toward death / without thought or regret…" At one point the poet asks, "Who might be my guides and mentors? / Where are my helpers, now that I demand them?" In this stunning collection of poems, Cortney Davis becomes our guide, our mentor, holding the reader in her arms the fashion she held her daughter on both her outset and final journeys, "all the mode habitation."

―Richard M. Berlin, author of Freud on My Couch

I Hear Their Voices Singing: Poems New & Selected

July 2020

Winner of a silverish medal in theAmerican Journal of Nursing'southward Volume of the Yr Awardsin the category of Creative Works and a finalist for the 2021 CT Center for the Book Award in Poetry.

I honey these poems and the poet-nurse who writes them. She is empathetic, curious, discrete, fascinated, candid, in dear with the human body – its drips and weight – and the life it carries. Praise Cortney Davis and her marvelous poems. Read them now.

--Hilda Raz, author of List & Story

Over the years, Cortney Davis' long vocation as a nurse has placed her with human beings who find themselves over the threshold of injury or illness, or on the threshold of dying, at times crossing over. Her vocation equally a poet has allowed her to take these liminal moments, or hours, with patients and plough them into poems written with fearlessness, clarity, and compassion. You will find but these qualities of tenderness and strength in the poems selected for I HEAR THEIR VOICES SINGING.

--Margaret Gibson, Poet Laureate of Connecticut

Awards for Taking Care of Time

"Taking Care of Time," winner of the

Wheelbarrow Poesy Prize from the Michigan State University Poetry Center was chosen as an American Journal of Nursing Volume of the Year in Creative Works and was recently selected to receive the CT Center for the Volume Honour in Poetry

Taking Intendance of Time

2016 Wheelbarrow Books

Prize for Poetry

Congratulations toCortney Davis, winner of the 2016 Wheelbarrow Prize for Poesy for her drove, Taking Care of Time. Selected past estimate Naomi Shihab Nye, Taking Intendance of Time will be published by the MSU Press in 2018. Cortney Davis, a nurse practitioner, is the writer of Leopold'southward Maneuvers (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the Prairie Schooner Poetry Prize; Details of Flesh(Calyx Books); 3 poesy chapbooks; two works of nonfiction, and two anthologies (every bit co-editor). Her poems accept appeared nationally and internationally in journals including Poetry, Hudson Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry E, Rattle, and others.

"Davis' skills every bit a nurse practitioner and her unflinching to-the-bone gifts as a writer mix eloquently to create a manuscript that volition grip and compel readers," writes Naomi Shihab Nye. "A corking book, not to exist missed. It was an laurels to select Taking Care of Fourth dimension for the first Wheelbarrow Books prize."

"When words fail, that's when poetry begins" Yehuda Amichai

Why I Write

~ To laurels the mystery of the body. Why does it heal or non heal, both physically and emotionally? I've seen patients who, according to medical science, should be dying; yet they alive. Or, what about a patient who dies and at autopsy is found to exist perfectly good for you? How do nosotros survive? How do nosotros beloved or neglect to love? And what is the part of dream, of retentiveness? What happens to us subsequently we die—not to our bodies simply to "u.s.a."? These mysteries are asked through poems, stories, essays.

~ My ain fears of abandonment come into consciousness equally I watch patients fade from life into illness and death.

~ Poesy and prose are the sanities that give phonation to our collective fright of death, abandonment, and aloneness, as well every bit to our collective celebration of birth, relationship, and creativity.

~ At the beginning of the 21st century, in the midst of burgeoning technology, writing about the concrete body—how it fails or survives and how we treat information technology—is apace becoming the dominant mythology of medicine. When nosotros write, nosotros arroyo caregiving with spirituality and mystery, two touchstones that technology and the distance information technology imposes have stripped away.

~ What we bear witness to equally caregivers is perhaps more of import than what nosotros theorize near.

~ As caregivers, we come across what few others are permitted to see. This entitlement brings with it a responsibility to tell the emotional truth.

~ My own voice as a writer has been informed by my nurse'southward training. The language of medicine is generally encoded and oblique, designed, it seems, to go on patients at bay. And then my writing rebels and becomes directly. As a nurse I was taught to depict, to be articulate and curtailed in my notes, to put in all the details but not to "diagnose." Nurses become good at implication.

~ The careful observation of individual suffering opens first the heart, then the heed, to universal suffering.

Books

When the Nurse Becomes a Patient front cover.jpg

When the Nurse Becomes a Patient: A Story in Words and Images

Available on amazon.com or from your local book seller

"With a nurse'due south skillful centre and a poet's intrepid centre, Cortney Davis guides the states through the harrowing world of illness and healing. Her rich paintings and prose coax open the patient experience in a mode both unflinchingly honest and doggedly empathic." --Danielle Ofri, Writer and medico

Awarded a gilded medal Living At present laurels; an American Journal of Nursing Volume of the Twelvemonth award in the category of Public Interest and Inventiveness; a gold medal Benjamin Franklin award; and named a finalist in the category of memoir in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards

The Heart's Truth: Essays on the Art of Nursing

Available on amazon.com or from your local book seller

"'The Heart's Truth: Essays on the art of Nursing' should be required reading at every nursing school in the land. In writing of the highest quality, it offers a powerful and moving portrait of what it means to be a nurse."
—Richard Selzer, surgeon and author

Voted one of the "top fifty must read books for nurses in 2012" (the list Ivntorn.net); awarded a statuary medal Living At present volume honour in the category of Health and Wellness; an Contained Publishers' silver medal in the category of essay / creative non-fiction; an American Journal of Nursing volume of the twelvemonth accolade in the category of Public Interest / Creativity

Details of Flesh (poesy)

Bachelor on amazon.com or from the publisher, CALYX Books

Reviewer Doug Marx writes, "For Davis, there'due south no split between what Yeats chosen the 'life' and the 'piece of work.' Her profession provides an emotional and metaphorical framework for her art. There'due south a compassionate matter-of-factness in these frequently graphic poems, and that tone is, in many ways, the book'south real success. Davis avoids the dangers inherent in this kind of material: voyeurism, self-martyrdom, New Historic period sentiment. Somewhat surprisingly, these poems are fairly free of blackness humor, a non uncommon characteristic among those who witness a lot of suffering. Instead, Davis brings to her experience an awareness of human being sexuality that is nearly revelatory in this seemingly asexual context. A kind of liberation is generated by such honesty, something a m hours of 'ER' or "Chicago Promise' could never induce."

Leopold's Maneuvers (poetry)

Bachelor on amazon.com

"Leopold'south Maneuvers takes the torso—gorgeous, suffering, medicalized, mythologized, abused, and loved—every bit its central topic. Both harsh and beautiful, these poems are acts of spiritual survival."
—poetry judges Robin Becker and Peggy Shumaker

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Poetry Book Award; awarded an American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year award in the category of Public Interest / Creativity

Learning to Heal: Reflections on Nursing Schoolhouse in Poetry and Prose

About "Learning to Heal: Reflections on Nursing School in Poetry and Prose," poet and doctor Jack Coulehan says, "In consistently engaging poesy and prose, this album captures the lived experiences of student nurses in multiple voices over many decades." Read the work of 51 writers who share their memories--the adept, the harrowing, and the humorous--every bit they traveled the educational path to graduation equally professional nurses.

Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses

Edited by Cortney Davis and Judy Schaefer; available on amazon.com or from your local book seller

"A striking, ofttimes cute collection which brings to speech what occurs between the caring and the cared for—moments at the edges of life when, for most of u.s.a., fifty-fifty crucial communication seems beyond the accomplish of words. Coming now, Between the Heartbeats seems a particularly important book, breaking as it does the silence of women and men, who, mayhap more than any others, alive the essentials behind the health care debate."
—Honor Moore

Intensive Intendance: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses

Edited by Cortney Davis and Judy Schaefer; available on amazon.com or from your local book seller

"Intensive Care has what it takes—exceptional quality and a variety of styles and topics. I'd recommend this volume to anyone in the wellness professions who likes stories and is interested in the human dimension of patient intendance. Moreover, this album volition be a valuable resource for use in literature, humanities, or ideals courses in nursing schools and for similar courses in medical schools every bit well. It'due south worth far more than the price of admission."
—Jack Coulehan in Journal of the American Medical Association

Awarded an American Journal of Nursing Book of the Twelvemonth award in the category of Public Interest / Creativity

I Knew a Adult female: Four Patients and their Female Caregiver

This volume from Random House is currently out of print, simply used copies are bachelor on amazon.com and from other book sellers

"In this compelling look at how women's bodies influence, and sometimes dramatically change, their lives, readers get intimately acquainted not only with women's body parts, but also with several specific women. . . In this book, Davis holds a mirror up to the whole woman, letting united states see inside and out. She provides a fascinating await non only at how women's bodies piece of work, but also at a medical professional'south emotions. Readers may detect themselves wishing that the perceptive Davis were their ain nurse practitioner."

--Publisher'southward Weekly starred review

Awarded the 2002 Connecticut Center for the Book Non-Fiction Prize (that large round circumvolve on the cover is the honour medal!)

The Body Flute

This hand-set, hand-sewn chapbook of five poems was produced past Gary Metras at his Adastra Printing in Massachusetts. The first edition of 360 copies was printed on felt-textured Strathmore Grandee paper with a flame-similar woodcut ending each poem and blood-cerise inside covers. This limited edition chapbook has been sold out.

"The key voices nosotros observe expressed in this dauntless poetry are those voices which occupy the witting selflessness of a nurse. Davis writes ragelessly and truthfully about her experiences. Probably this poetry is too honorable ever to be widely circulated and widely appreciated, considering honorable behavior is anathema to the citizenry of the shallows. Bravo."

—Dusty Canis familiaris Reviews

Willy Nilly: Poems for Children

This professionally printed stapled chapbook is a collection of poems for children and adults with color illustrations by my children. Printed in limited edition, this chapbook is available but from me. Please email me if interested!

To Begin Once more

This volume is available on amazon.com or from the publisher, world wide web.oaktara.com

"To Begin Once more" is a curt novella about a young OB-GYN resident in training in a mod-mean solar day hospital clinic. She loves her work; she is happily married. When she and her husband discover that she is pregnant, she believes that her merely selection is to terminate her pregnancy. She is in the midst of residency and her husband, besides a md, is facing several more years of medical education. They don't know what their future holds. They take no idea where they will live or where they will practice medicine. This book examines a woman's decision making procedure when faced with what seems to be such a momentous personal dilemma. Alert: there are some graphic and accurate descriptions of medical procedures in this book.

A Few Poems

I Want To Work in a Hospital

where it's okay

to climb into bed with patients

and hold them—

pre-op, before they lose

their legs or breasts, or later,

to tell them

they are withal whole.

Or post-partum,

when they have just returned

from that strange garden,

or when they are dying,

as if somehow considering I stay

they are costless to get.

I want the daylight

I walk out into

to become the flashlight they carry,

waving it every bit we go together

into their long dark.

(start appeared in Bellevue Literary Review)

Mother's Gloves

I wear latex gloves

to keep patients' germs away—

staph, herpes, HIV—every viral song,

each bacterial worry.

Accustomed to such risky love,

I rummage drawers at home

to unearth warmer gloves:

blue calfskin, the silky buttoned bone

or ivory elbow length I establish

in Female parent's coat, now my ain.

Are nosotros bound

to work, historic period, sicken, dice

alone—not skin to skin?

How tin it be? I, who tin't remember

Mother'southward hugs, find my fingers in-

side Mother's gloves.

(starting time appeared in Ontario Review)

Ear Examined

The doctor tugs the fleshy lobe, pulls up

and back, the culvert thereby made straight.

Enter his probing speculum, its light a triangle

on the drum. Pearly, uninformed, it waits

for the otoscope'south puff of air. Like a sheet

snapped by tiny chambermaids, it flaps,

teased past air to exam its worth for sound:

those words we long for—

a whispered oath, a prevarication.

A trickster, the ear. Making us believe

what optics deny or hearts might doubt,

the narrow bones inside similar a sparrow'south

in flight, willing to trust the slightest cakewalk,

the i that sings Yes! I beloved y'all!—

every bit if words might hateful exactly what was heard.

Oh, the chance, the delicate wing.

(commencement appeared in Bellevue Literary Review)

Water Story

I love the living sound of my plant

when I h2o it,

the hiss and suck of agua

pulled through the soil by gravity,

the sweat that appears on the clay pot,

the unwrinkling of the leaves.

I had a patient once, pregnant female parent

morning sick and evening sick, who arrived

hauling her children, carrying her bucket.

We slipped a needle in her vein,

dripped saline into her body's dry out cadre

and, right earlier me, the adult female

plumped upwards. My ivy overflows—

a thread of h2o and fertilizer returns to earth

through the sink mouth. I am happy

that all life is circular. Seven months later,

the woman'southward stubby boy popped out, head first.

Blood and water flooded the catch basin,

spilled over.

I carry this story on my white shoes.

(beginning appeared in Prairie Schooner)

Become In Bear on

Looking forward to hearing from you with comments or questions! I'm always interested in coming together other writers and other caregivers who write virtually their experiences in this mysterious and magical globe nosotros call healthcare.

parkeronewarthill46.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.cortneydavis.com/