"Poet and physician Charles Bardes presents a work of prose poetry with elements of eulogy, ode, and tragedy as he follows his father's grievous two-year battle with cancer....In this challenging book of a father and son confronting disease and death, Bardes questions closely what it means for life to lend itself to death."

Booklist

“In his Diary in the form of a prose poem, Charles Bardes traces the works and days of a twilit ordeal of love and suffering. With Ovidian power and moral clarity, he tells how a man of the sea is given over to fire and a father and son are annealed.”

Susan Stewart, author of Red Rover

“Fashioning a remarkable and truly original account of an octogenarian father’s two-year battle with cancer, Bardes tells a powerful, allusive, and richly layered human fable about our common and ‘fatal metamorphosis.’”

Michael Collier, author of An Individual History