Books
SELF-PORTRAIT IN HOSPITAL AS CAMUS
Poetry chapbook, winner of the 2022 Diode Editions Chapbook Prize (Release Date: April 1, 2023)
Mediating on the absurd, the existential, and the sincere, the poems in SELF-PORTRAIT IN HOSPITAL AS CAMUS struggle with the futility of scientific and philosophical tenets of objectivity as framed by human suffering within the hospital’s walls. In vacillating between praising the wonder of human anatomy and scientific discovery while decrying the senselessness of man’s achievements and ambitions in the face of a meaningless and finite existence, this collection reaches its crescendo in the only reasonable apotheosis: if nothing matters, everything must.
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ADVANCE PRAISE
“In the long line of physician-poets, this debut collection carries the freshest and most overtly philosophical voice, by turns gently surrealist, painfully realistic and stringently post-modernist. Rancy’s poems take on shapes as narrow as an Arizona string-tie and as broad as a prose poem dressed as a surgeon’s operative report. Their tone is as experimental as Rae Armantrout, as mischievous as Bolaño and as tender as Kay Ryan. They will entertain you and some will keep you up at night.”
— Michael Salcman, M.D., editor of Poetry in Medicine and author of Shades & Graces: New Poems, inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (2020)