Rope Made of Bandages by Deborah Bayer

“Who heals the healer? In Deborah Bayer’s Rope Made of Bandages, we have a clear view into the world of a doctor on the precipice of retirement, battling cancer, fighting for peace after a lifetime of trauma. For the casual reader, Bayer presents hard pills to swallow: patients who embrace death, the grind of cancer treatments, and the coronavirus exhausting the human capital of our beloved medical professionals. For fans of craft, you have a soup of forms – a villanelle, a ghazal, and a crown of sonnets, to name a few. Bayer presents her hard-won lesson: Even when faced with certain death, the power of self-love is the greatest healer of all.”

–Ben Hyland, author of Shelter in Place (Moonstone Press, 2022)

In Rope Made of Bandages, Deborah Bayer speaks vividly as a doctor working with AIDS patients and a cancer patient herself. In this skillfully written collection, Bayer doesn’t avert her eyes from a patient who dies because she quits taking her medication and another who loses a toe, then “half a foot, then a leg below the knee.” Bayer’s recovery from cancer is depicted, but it is secondary to the power and passion of the poems that demonstrate her commitment to her patients and convey the demands and rewards of being a physician in a hospital and clinic in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Her poetic mastery is evident in the inventive, varied forms she uses—sonnets, a villanelle, a prose poem, an acrostic, a ghazal, and even an obverse (a form invented by Nicole Sealey). Her free verse poems are equally polished and varied. The rope made of bandages in her title effectively represents the constraints and the healing power of her life as a doctor and her inventiveness as a poet.

–Barbara Daniels, author of Talk to the Lioness (Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press, 2020)

Bayer’s speaker, like herself, is physician, patient, and poet, and this chapbook, Rope Made of Bandages, is revelatory–brimful of compassion and heart-opening honesty. She says, “I need a healing that is soft and kind.” She says, “each poem I write is an interim / statement, so I can be reconciled.” It’s a surprising collection of poems that sing beautifully in their own “deep register,” in a voice that is humane, lyric, and torn.

–Renée Ashley, Author of Ruined Traveler and Minglements: Prose on Poetry and Life