No Acute Distress

Jennifer Richter’s penetrating second collection of poems, No Acute Distress, introduces us to the unspoken struggles and unanticipated epiphanies of illness and motherhood, subjects rarely explored together in contemporary poetry. The first poem of each section borrows from a classic joke form—one begins, “An intractable migraine walks into a bar”—to consider the thin line this mother walks between the tragic and comic: debilitating pain met with increasingly absurd and desperate medical ...