Stunning, rhythmic, and existential, these poems are like a patient etherized - in the middle of the desert.

Being confronted with death, at any age, concentrates the mind. All the more so when you have just recently arrived halfway to the elusive threescore years and ten. How do you find yourself, in this crisis? And, if you survive, where do you go from here?

As a Patient Thinks about the Desert addresses these questions at every step along the road "from melting day to overwhelming darkness," but also through hospitalization to the promise of recovery, and even of love unforeseen. It is a reckoning with one's finite limits in invigorating verse that both demands to be read aloud and invites the silence of meditation. "Sand that cannot know it is the sand."

Philosopher of emotion, translator of Rilke, and interpreter of Kierkegaard, Rick Anthony Furtak introduces his own distinctive poetic voice in this volume, speaking both in sickness and in health.