Intern Year by Kristin LaFollette coming soon for purchase!

Synopsis

Intern Year is an account of the poet’s experiences during the “intern year,” a period shaped by medicine, medical intervention, and resilience. While LaFollette was participating in an internship program for students interested in the health professions—which involved working in various clinical and hospital settings, including emergency medicine, surgery, and intensive care—she was also navigating her own injury, surgery, and recovery. At the same time, her father was in a devastating and near-fatal accident, resulting in a lengthy hospital stay and rehabilitation. Through anatomical imagery and clinical detail, the poems zero in on the complexities of the “intern year,” exploring the vulnerability of the body, healing, and providing care for patients and family members and emphasizing that medicine is not merely a science but also a deeply human practice.

Keywords: caretaking, family, hospital, injury, medical humanities, medicine, recovery

Praise for Intern Year

Kristin LaFollette’s compelling new collection, Intern Year, makes deft use of the language of medicine and hospitals to weave together a fractured narrative of injury and loss, recovery, and coming to terms with the fragility of bodies. In settings ranging from hospital rooms to truck beds, bodies are bathed and examined and repaired. The speaker of these poems sometimes hovers as if nearly disembodied, other times fully embodied as she watches her father struggle to recover from a traumatic accident, undergoes medical training, and contemplates her own wounds. These poems are visceral, grounded in blood and bone, but also in the language of psalms and hymns in which resides a kind of wonder, “Body, great creator, show us what you yet may do.” LaFollette’s poems remind us that dying is part of living, and that attention itself—the clear, open-eyed observation present throughout this entire mesmerizing collection—is a kind of love.

—Rebecca Aronson, author of Anchor

Kristin LaFollette’s second collection is an investigation into how the body holds trauma—“the slow forming / heat of mourning”—an unearthing, and an unbraiding of entwined injuries, in which the speaker “became caregiver and patient.” The poet names it so, claiming, “This is a reorganization, an assembly.” It is also stitched with the beautiful language of deer, “rabbit keepers,” “honeycomb bone,” “intercostal space,” “a map of epithelium,” and a “harbor of misplaced blood.” There’s vitality in these pages, a sense of active exploration into self-history, and an honoring of the individual experience that can get lost inside the collective one, especially for caregivers, often for women. Indeed, “Splints are for women / who must continue tending / to the needs of others.” Intern Year is a brave and visceral return to “underlying softness” and a gesture toward healing “the brewing of / new trauma from the old.”

—Rebecca Hart Olander, author of Singing from the Deep End

The poems in Kristin LaFollette’s Intern Year look back on the lived experience of a year-long internship in the medical field—a year coinciding with personal and familial trauma in which the author and her father navigate their own injuries and rehabilitations. As she becomes both “caregiver and patient,” the language of medicine gives the speaker a way to explore “the unpredictability of the body” and “the brewing of / new trauma from the old.” Traversing unfamiliar, often difficult territories—experiential, linguistic—this is a poetry of witness, documenting “the rebuilding / and survival of a system.” Direct, observational, and unflinching, LaFollette’s poems grapple with the burden of time and of healing through narratives of damage, repair, and recovery. Intern Year captures the grammar of the body—its fragility and its strength.

—Jennifer Moore, author Easy Does It

Kristin LaFollette is the author of Hematology (winner of the 2021 Harbor Editions Laureate Prize) and Body Parts (winner of the 2017 GFT Press Chapbook Prize). She received an M.A. in creative writing from Indiana University South Bend and a Ph.D. in rhetoric and writing studies from Bowling Green State University. She is a professor at the University of Southern Indiana. Learn more at kristinlafollette.com.