Poet on a Wobbly Bicycle

You already know Fleda Brown’s poetry, I hope. Maybe you attended one of her readings at Dog Ears Books. Now we all have an opportunity to know the former Poet Laureate of Delaware* (now a Traverse City resident) as a thoughtful memoir essayist. The pieces in this book, originally published in Brown’s blog, face her diagnosis and life with cancer directly, from the only possible standpoint for the experience: personal and subjective. Many also address what it means to live as a writer, with or without a life-threatening illness. In all of them, an honest, gifted woman looks for just the right language to convey her experience to others. Others with cancer. With aging parents. Other women. Other writers.

But you don’t have to have cancer or be a writer to get a lot out of this book. Or to want to read it more than once. Or to share it with a friend. 

Or all of the above.

My Wobbly Bicycle: Meditations

on Cancer and the Creative Life

by Fleda Brown

Mission Point Press

Paper, 197pp, $14.95









*Before correcting this post, I had given Vermont the honor of Fleda's poet laureateship. Apologies to both states. If I ever have the privilege of visiting, I'm sure I'll no longer mix them up.