With candour and grace, Leah Kaminsky focuses her physician’s gaze with scalpel-like precision, as she probes the secrets of the body’s terrain. Exploring the vulnerability of the human condition, she examines our fragile lives as we confront our own mortality – the weakness and the strength that emerge from the tumult of illness and decline, trauma and war. Kaminsky lowers her doctor’s mask, using a deft poetic lens as she straddles the realms of science and the soul, shining light on the malady of illness. By checking her own emotional temperature, she foregrounds torment as well as resilience, creating a powerful and graceful elegy to both the living and the dead.

‘Leah Kaminsky’s poems here are visceral, incisive and stirring with sinewy threads of rawness and spirit. Disorders of the Blood delivers both elegiac and emotive fierceness, a poetic delight.’ – —ALICIA SOMETIMES

‘Kaminsky’s poems find the jarring fragments – the bruising moments, the vulnerabilities laid bare – which follow a doctor from surgery to oncology ward to home… echoing memories and family legacies… Kaminsky’s wider compassionate concerns, dreamlike and haunting, shine through.’ – CATE KENNEDY