The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes

On returning north to Amsterdam from a writer's residency in the south of Holland, poet and novelist Lieke Marsman received grave news: the shoulder pain that had been bothering her for years, and that had recently become unbearable, was found to have been caused by a malignant tumour the size of a grapefruit; it was chondrosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer. Frank, conversational and suffused with a dry humour, The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes is a record of the diagnosis and the events and thoughts that took place around it. But this is also a collection that turns its attention outwards, towards societal ills and their perpetrators, including the political class and Big Pharma. An energising mix of prose and lyric, the poems (many of which share their title with that of the collection, rendering it an at once mundane and threatening refrain) start to feel like scans themselves, offering readings of both the writer and her environment. Beautifully translated by the poet Sophie Collins, the book also includes a translator's note in the form of a letter to her author and friend.