Little Pharma

“Sometimes when I leave the lab,” the doctor-poet Laura Kolbe writes in Little Pharma, “what’s outside / seems some detail of anatomy still, as if always / the metal gurney underlay the day.” The ways in which intense observations of bodies and their pathologies take over a physician’s sensibilities—an emphysema patient’s heart looks “rakish,” the cadaver assigned for her months-long dissection becomes a tender “parody of fidelity”—form a central motif of this wryly detailed and compassionate debut collection. 

“What I learn is / parts, is a lessening,” Kolbe writes of her medical training, but Little Pharma shows how a doctor’s unsentimental eye for detail paired with poetic imagination can create sympathetic renderings of patients’ afflictions. We observe the “the world’s slowest snowfall” as a tumor on Mr. K’s spine leads to gradual paralysis; an abnormal mass on another patient’s PET scan startles with light, not shadow: “Nothing has prepared the brightness of this bird.” Training the eye on herself in “Little Pharma on Her Youth,” Kolbe bravely asserts her culpability in the death of a patient, whose hemorrhaging brain she was too slow to diagnose. To imagine the patient's ghost muttering "you terrible" is the poet's formidable way of demonstrating the difficulty of becoming a doctor: the immutability of death overwhelms the young doctor's yearning for forgiveness and self-improvement.

The last sections of Little Pharma provide relief by considering what her education has postponed: “I know I’ve been waiting to be happy.” These poems on art, love, and marriage possess the wit and precision of Kolbe’s medical poems, but their dazzling associations intimate a more carefree life, where physical detail reaches for metaphysical rapture:

If I cotton to an ultimate mercy,
it is one of two-ply robes and hammered velvet,
the kingfisher humming Tallis to the sunset