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ISBN 978 1 903090 64 0

(c) Keith Tuma 2025.

These are beautiful, awe-inspiring, tender, something entirely new.  Read these if
you have the courage. They will lift your heart, comfort your heart, and push
your heart off a cliff.

—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean. 

"Man proposes but God disposes", my mother used to say, laughing grimly when
things collapsed. I think she'd have liked the way Keith Tuma sharpens up his prose
here, to observe the objects and events of the world with dry laconic humour, but
is then forced himself to endure that hard scrutiny as calamity strikes to the heart.

—Trevor Joyce, author of What's in Store.

Catastrophe slowly unfolds across Studies in the Unnatural World. Tuma’s poetic
prose registers the shock, but its wondering deadpan somehow also manages to
keep in sight what matters most.

—Fergal Gaynor, author of Clio’s Ground: New and Selected Poems.

A compelling and moving and remarkably witty elegy without a hint of
sentimentality, Studies in the Unnatural World maintains its delicate tonal control
throughout, despite the intimacy and sorrow of its material. Prose poetry is
difficult to achieve, but these are poems in the fullest sense because poems gather
together different strands and facets of our languages and spheres of experience
and knowledge in constellations, and that’s what the various “ologies” that make
up these Studies manage to do without any feeling either of forcing or of excess.
A vital book.

—David Lloyd, author of The Harm Fields.

Cover photo: Diane Tuma.

See below for the preface to STUDIES IN THE UNNATURAL WORLD and the prose poem ONCOLOGY

PREFACE

The Strongman Run was one of the memorable events Diane and I witnessed in the fall of 2013 when I was in Differdange, Luxembourg to teach at Miami University’s campus there for a semester and lead a study tour in Venice. A half-marathon with obstacles, the event ran participants up and down hills across the countryside and through mud and rough turf, making them climb over tires piled high and bales of hay and meshed ropes like those used in military training. At the top of one obstacle, they encountered a slide that sent them down into neck-high water, and beyond that they had to wade or swim through soap bubbles almost as deep. Diane and I had our first sight of the runners as they re-entered Differdange on Rue John F. Kennedy, the main drag in the old steel town, through lines of locals hooting their approval. It was a spectacle the likes of which we had never seen. As they passed us, the runners were coated with bubbles, and the pavement beneath them swirled with soap fumes—as if ghosts were nipping at their ankles.

That same fall, our daughter Allison was 25. She would complete her Master’s in Health Administration at St. Louis University that year and begin a year-long fellowship at Children’s Hospital in Cincinnati before accepting a position as a Project Manager in the Cancer Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Allison had great friends, and many of them, and a boyfriend in a medical residency in Albany. She had everything to look forward to and she was ready for it. She was smart and witty and kind, a lover of animals including her maltipoo Moose. Allison wanted to join us in Differdange for a week, but with no space to put her up in our tiny upstairs apartment near the chateau and little time to work with because of the teaching and travel already packed into those four months, it didn’t happen. She would have loved the food and sights of Paris, Strasbourg, and Bruges that Diane and I enjoyed on outings during our stay. But in the fall of 2013 who knew what lay ahead. 

Allison’s cancers—breast, ovarian, and thyroid—were identified in March 2017 and treated with a series of surgeries, chemotherapies, immunotherapies, and proton radiation. A year after her initial diagnosis, she was declared free of everything except the testing for recurrence she insisted on. We got on with our lives, Allison with hers. Then a couple of years later, in August 2020, I was out on our deck enjoying a martini when I received a phone call. It was Allison, with news that the cancer was back. It had spread throughout her bones, liver, and brain. Without treatment, she could have as little as three months to live. 

Allison had always known that the cancer would be back and terminal at some point, and she’d say impossibly sweet things like “I hope I die first because I wouldn’t want to be in the world without you.” But we convinced ourselves that she’d be in her forties or fifties when she had to deal with cancer again, not 32. She’d gone through so much already, all of it seemingly endless—the appointments, the surgeries, the radiation, even the episodes of Breaking Bad watched and re-watched during the long recovery from chemo. It hardly seemed fair, yet here we were again.

By August 2020, of course, the pandemic was raging, and I was forced to teach remotely. The unlikely silver lining to this was that “remotely” is a relative term. So Diane and I packed our bags and headed for a rented house in Malden, Massachusetts to be near Allison as she entered her latest round of treatments. Allison too was moving, to the wharf in the North End so that her last months could be spent looking out over the ocean. As it turned out, she had three more years, initially in Boston and then up in Maine, in Portland and Lewiston. Not having toured the entirety of the European continent with Allison while I was in Luxembourg is one of a number of regrets I live with now. Allison died in late August 2023 after six years of living with cancer.
*
I started writing Studies in the Unnatural World before Allison’s initial diagnosis. I have long been interested in the prose poem. I’m equally drawn to works that complicate the definitions of (and boundaries between) genres and disciplines, particularly when such works examine the relationship between nature and culture. I began this project with the idea of writing short works of prose or prose poetry comprising anecdote, discourse, metaphor, and speculation. These were to be organized and generated by the name of a particular discipline (I speak to friends of my “ologies”). That was the plan. Then I found myself confronted by the most “unnatural” thing I could imagine, news of a genetic mutation in Allison, our beloved daughter.

Readers might expect me to conclude this preface with a snug comparison between the sections that follow and the obstacles encountered in the Differdange Strongman event. There is nothing snug to be found here. What follows is my account of trying to accept something that I still cannot fathom. The poet John Davidson writes of how “the whited fangs of change daily devour the old demesne.” I know what that means. Though it’s more poetry than I need.   

Oncology

The oncology nurse likes to talk about everyday life—traffic this morning during her commute to the city, plans for a holiday still a few months away, her daughter’s decision to quit college and move in with friends in a tiny North End apartment. “And who is paying for that?” The oncology nurse is friendly, but this is her professional talk. She’s killing time for Allison, who is waiting for chemotherapy. The drugs must be made up and bagged on the morning of the infusions. Pharmacists must wait on white blood cell counts to get the go-ahead. The oncology nurse acts as if she has all the time in the world. I have come from far away, Allison’s boyfriend too. We’ve driven across town to buy dry ice to freeze the blue turban Allison will wrap around her head to keep her hair from falling out. “Would you like some crackers?” the oncology nurse asks. “This first one will take forty minutes,” she says, and names the drug. Allison knows its name already. “The steroids will keep you strong, more energetic than usual, for a day or two.” The oncology nurse reminds Allison that she’ll need to flush her toilet twice if others are staying in her apartment. If she has a high fever she is to come back to the hospital. She’s seen the blue turban before, yes.