Poetry Collection — Pecan Grove Press, 2003
Almost Home Free
A collection of poems about the journey of a cancer patient—with an underlying story of family, struggle and a way to live amidst uncertainty. Trounstine takes us through a year of horror, treatment and healing and the book has been called touching, “luminous,” “provocative,” and “a source of comfort.” A must-read for anyone who wants to understand what their loved ones go through.
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About the Book
In January of 2000, just after the Millennium celebrations died down, I found a lump in my right breast. I was in Texas, at my mother-in-law’s, miles away from my Boston home. Like many who enter the dark tunnel of cancer, I feared for my life, fought back with treatment and depended on family and friends to help me with hope. My particular nature also took me to the page where I found comfort in writing and a way to express my unique as well as my universal experiences.
Thus began a journey, a journey fostered by my innate understanding that art is always most important to the artist when it joins forces with survival. The writing of Almost Home Free first came in long freewrites, words pouring out over each other. Then, over the course of the cancer treatment and healing process, the book found its form and words took shape in poems.
I think of these poems as a narrative: they tell a year in the life of a breast cancer patient but the underlying story is of family, struggle and a way to live amidst uncertainty. Poem after poem taught me that it is in the moment where the survivor lives most fully. Almost Home Free is the story of how none of us make it home, free.
Poetry Collection — Pecan Grove Press, 2003
Praise for Almost Home Free
“Jean Trounstine, activist author of Shakespeare Behind Bars, has written a superb book on her battle with breast cancer. That same emotional energy pulses through these poems in Almost Home Free, from the terror of being swallowed by her disease to that breathless limbo of grateful wonder where the patient, freed from the clutch of deadly disease, wanders the universe seeking signs that she is indeed home free. A glorious, triumphant, courageous book.”
— Robert J. Ray, author of The Weekend Novelist
“With lucidity and courage, Jean Trounstine forges alliances with her readers exploring the turbulent journey of a cancer patient. In this journey, we are blessed by the language of healing — triumphant, translucently honest. Almost Home Free is a tale of fortitude.”
— Marjorie Agosin, author of The Angel of Memory, Dear Anne Frank and more than 20 other books
“Jean Trounstine’s Almost Home Free is a book for every one of us who has contemplated our life from the heights and depths of opposing forces. From the crucible of fear and uncertainty Trounstine limns a character who looks and acts just like us. This is the first of many truths Trounstine gives us in this extraordinary collection of poems.”
— Pam Bernard, author of My Own Hundred Doors, Across the Dark and Blood Garden
“Jean Trounstine shares a portion of her life in this collection of poems and those undergoing treatment in the future may read these poems and feel less alone. Family and friends will find them useful to more fully understand the physical and emotional tolls and emergence. It is healing for all.”
— Dr. Susan Troyan, Surgical Director, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston
After Chemotherapy
From Almost Home Free
My sister asks, Do you take a bath every day?
That night I dream of bathing in a closet,
up to my neck in warm water, oiled, perfumed with rosemary,
the scent wafting around me like a blanket.
There are clothes. They’ll get wet.
The skirts and shirts can stay but
someone’s got to move those long dresses.
My mother bathed in the afternoon, sometimes in the morning,
her voluminous breasts bobbing on the water.
I loved to watch her sink into bubbles — the skin before it wrinkles,
a faint blush. Even a shower cap
couldn’t stop those wisps around her ears.
Prickles of hair pebbled her legs.
Freckles across her chest rising just to the nape of her neck,
her chin jutted into the air as if to say
This is my place to go,
my closet, my safe spot away from it all.
Yes, I tell my sister, I take a bath every day.
I just want to sit near my mother,
hand her soap after soap, bring her back.
If only I could have her near me now,
leaning over the tub, soap in her hand,
rubbing my arms, my back, my breast.
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