RATTLE magazine dedicates new issue to unique literary community
Press Release Body: To most, the words "nurse" and "poetry" are not usually synonymous. Yet, if poetry is "a deal of joy and pain and wonder," as Kahlil Gibran once said, then aren't nurses-as witnesses to innumerable human struggles and triumphs-the most highly qualified poets of us all?
RATTLE thinks so. That's why the poetry journal's winter issue will pay homage to nurse poets by featuring, along with the magazine's usual 80 pages of regular poetry, a selection of poems by nurse authors around the world. Funny, heartbreaking, and poignant, these poems offer extraordinary insight into the remarkable lives of people who have dedicated their lives to helping others.
Nurse poets are not new to literary acknowledgement. Book anthologies like Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses (edited by RATTLE contributors Cortney Davis and Judy Schaefer) and The Poetry of Nursing: Poems and Commentaries of Leading Nurse-Poets have devoted their pages to the poetic voices of nurses. RATTLE's forthcoming issue will exhibit poems by both established nurse poets-several of whom have appeared in anthologies like those above-and nurses new to publication.
Says editor Tim Green, "At RATTLE, we're most interested in the human experience, what I means to be alive; the joy, sorrow, fear, courage, triumph, failure. Nurses are right in the thick of all of that on a daily basis. So, you would expect that the poems would be very interesting, but I wasn't prepared for just how sharp and perceptive and well-crafted they are. It's going to be a great issue."
Also included in this issue will be essays by nurse-poets Cortney Davis, Madeleine Mysko, T.S.Davis, and Anne Webster. Blending personal experience and literary insight, these essays elaborate on the connection between nursing and poetry and will enlighten readers who may be new to the concept of nurse-poets.
The issue will appear in bookstores December 1st, and can also be preordered at the magazine's website, RATTLE.com
2022
