Meghan O'Rourke

The book of a generation: a transformative look at chronic illness and autoimmune disease--from one of the country's most respected writers. Drawing on her own medical experience as well as fifteen years of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, Meghan O'Rourke's incisive new work speaks to an urgent subject: the epidemic scale of autoimmune disease in America--even greater with the advent of "Long Covid"--and where we go from here. Blending lyricism, erudition, candor, and empathy, O'Rourke reveals crucial, subtle complexities about the American struggle with chronic illness and autoimmune conditions, and offers new reasons for hope, as well as a new framework for thinking about infectious disease and autoimmune response going forward. Confronting everything from the challenges of diagnosis and treatment to the limitations posed by our traditional structures of medical care and the particular impact on various demographic populations, O'Rourke brings her deep and disparate talents and roles--critic, journalist, poet, teacher, and patient--together into one unified project, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier.

Reimagining Chronic Illness

The Invisible Kingdom

In this eloquent, somber memoir about the death of her mother and grieving aftermath, poet and journalist O'Rourke (Halflife) ponders the eternal human question: how do we live with the knowledge that we will one day die?

The Long Goodbye

In beautifully written and powerfully thought prose, A World Out of Reach offers a crucial record of COVID-19 and the cataclysmic spring of 2020--a record for us and for posterity--in the arresting voices of poets, essayists, scholars, and health care workers. Ranging from matters of policy and social justice to ancient history and personal stories of living under lockdown, this vivid compilation from The Yale Review presents a first draft of one of the most tumultuous periods in recent history. Contributors: Katie Kitamura - Laura Kolbe - Nitin Ahuja - Rena Xu - Alicia Christoff - Miranda Featherstone - Maya C. Popa - Major Jackson - John Witt - Octávio Luiz Motta Ferraz - Joan Naviyuk Kane - Nell Freudenberger - Briallen Hopper - Brandon Shimoda - Yusef Komunyakaa - Laren McClung - Eric O'Keefe-Krebs - Sean Lynch - Millicent Marcus - Meghana Mysore - Rachel Jamison Webster - Emily Ziff Griffin - Rowan Ricardo Philips - Kathryn Lofton - Monica Ferrell - Russell Morse - Randi Hutter Epstein - Noreen Khawaja - Victoria Chang - Joyelle McSweeney - Khameer Kidia - Emily Greenwood - Elisa Gabbert - Emily Bernard - Hafizah Geter - Emily Gogolak - Roger Reeves

Dispatches from Life Under Lockdown

A World Out of Reach

Invisible Kingdom

Invisible Kingdom, the

poems

Sun in days

"Anguished, beautifully written... The Long Goodbye is an elegiac depiction of drama as old as life." -- The New York Times Book Review From the author of The Invisible Kingdom, one of America's foremost young literary voices, a transcendent portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial love. What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Meghan O'Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief-its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies-an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond. O'Rourke's story is one of a life gone off the rails, of how watching her mother's illness-and separating from her husband-left her fundamentally altered. But it is also one of resilience, as she observes her family persevere even in the face of immeasurable loss. With lyricism and unswerving candor, The Long Goodbye conveys the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life, and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. Effortlessly blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, it is not only an exceptional memoir, but a necessary one.

A Memoir

A collection of poetic works features insomniac narrators who are coming of age in a threatening but promising mythical world, in a volume of poetry that follows its speakers' search for the true self in spite of destructive love affairs, encroaching war, and the fallen cathedrals of America.

Halflife

Named a Best Poetry Book of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review, Sun in Days is “O’Rourke’s most ravishing and brilliant collection yet” (Cathy Park Hong). From acclaimed poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke comes a powerful collection about the frailty of the body, the longing for a child, and the philosophical questions raised when the body goes dramatically awry. These formally ambitious poems and lyric essays give voice to the experience of illness, the permanence of loss, and invigorating moments of grace. A Paterson Poetry Prize finalist, Sun in Days is unsentimental yet deeply felt, characterized by O’Rourke’s signature lyric precision and force of observation.

Meghan O'Rourke

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