In the last three years of her life, Andrea Werblin Reid wrote 150 poems on living with ovarian cancer and end of life. Werblin Reid died of ovarian cancer in 2022. Her third collection of poetry, “To See Yourself As You Vanish,” will be published Sept. 9.
In this episode of In the Headlines, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor with The Cancer Letter, talks to Werblin Reid’s husband, Angus (Gus) Reid, and Werblin Reid’s friend, Sarah K. Sawyer. The two co-authored a story in last week’s issue of The Cancer Letter, “Andrea Werblin Reid’s unflinching poetry documents the realities of cancer care, clinical trials, and loss—Her collection, “To See Yourself As You Vanish,” will be published three years after her death.”
In the podcast, Reid and Sawyer talk about the challenge of putting together Werblin Reid’s poetry collection after her death.
“What she left us with was a large stack of work, certainly the pages number in the hundreds,” Reid said. “I had 150 in my head, I think, but maybe 170 of various levels of completion with a lot of overlap between them. She'd been writing in fragments and creating poems out of those. So, part of the work of producing the book and turning that into a book was what they call ‘sequencing and selection,’ in the industry, which is kind of a brutal process.”
Werblin Reid had “started on some sequencing before she was so rudely interrupted,” Reid said, but Reid and Sawyer and Werblin Reid’s other colleagues had to cut a collection of over 150 poems in half before the editing process was complete.
Reid left a lot of the writing decisions to experts. His role in the process was making sure that the poems stayed true to the essence of his late wife.
“It is a cancer book. It's a very unforgiving, unsentimental book, but she was funny,” Reid said. “I really didn't want a book that came out like she was just suffering and miserable all the time while she was writing it, or that she'd lost that sense of humor, because she hadn't. She was always mad as hell about it. She wasn't happy. But also, she was still Andi.”
Reid ends the podcast with a reading of Werblin Reid’s poem, Clinical Trial.
CLINICAL TRIAL
Andrea Werblin Reid
In exchange for a public chance at a longer private life, you give them,
not your body, but your body’s one error in calculation. the swerve,
detour, blunder unique to your system. you give them the soft scribble
of your consent. in exchange for a future where you might run
among penguins, or consider the altitude of a lark, his small brown body
racing vertically into the sky, you agree to be watched like a hawk.
Asked hundreds of times if you’re ok, if there’s anything they can get you.
longer life most people think. glass of water most people say,
since there is often some small thing lodged in the throat.
you remember that larks sing when they fly, unlike any other bird.
Her collection of poetry is available for preorder wherever you buy books.
Other stories mentioned in this podcast include:
The Directors: Mary Beckerle and Neli Ulrich on delivering cancer care across five states
Lou Weiner: Poetry and art help us imagine my mother’s world as a hidden child of the Holocaust
A transcript of this podcast is available: https://cancerletter.com/podcastc/20250813-AndreaReid/