Does She Have a Name?

Dramatic and intimate, the poems in Does She Have a Name? trace the journeys of two women-- one middle aged, the other her infant granddaughter--through near-mortal encounters with medical crises.  Both survive their trials, passing from life to death and back again; both face wrenching, unpredictable challenges; both emerge from years of therapy, made whole but alone, changed by experience in apparent and invisible ways.    Moving from a NICU unit's urgent ministrations to the patient work of neurologists and speech pathologists, told from the perspectives of parent, child, husband, and witness, and exploring questions of disability, difference, and the calculated value of human life, Does She Have a Name? is an affecting, provocative book of poems.
Grief & Loss.  Illness & Healing.  Family & Relationships.  Poetry book.  Poems.

George Witte is the author of four collections of poems: An Abundance of Caution, Does She Have a Name?, Deniability, and The Apparitioners.  His poems have been published in a range of journals and anthologized in The Best American Poetry, Old Flame, Rabbit Ears, and The Doll Collection.  He received Poetry magazine's Frederick Bock prize, as well as a fellowship from the New Jersey Council for the Arts.  The editor in chief of St. Martin's Press, he lives with his family in Ridgewood, New Jersey.