An Uprooted Orchid, touches on the power of words as medicine to navigate grief or illnesses that have disrupted home and family life. The speaker processes her father's health complications from pulmonary disease and shortly after her own diagnosis - aggressive breast cancer. This collection of poetry is about feeling the emotional and physical weight of losing - a loved one, a breast - but also about celebrating family and "the magic in ordinary/ bits and fragments of everyday life".
The poems serve as an ode to facing difficult journeys, "Dear Warrior, you are more than/ what happens to your body on the outside", while acknowledging every obstacle in the climb away from the gray area of grief, "Even a crystal doesn't do much in the dark/ until you hold her up to the beauty of day/ and watch her refract the light/ rainbow after rainbow".
Sit with these manifestations of light during difficult times, when some wounds are slow to heal. Find the glimmer in post-surgery screening of the self or taking the last prescription pills in a regiment of medication. Step into the awakening that comes with simply cherishing every moment and the second chance of healing.
Sarah Joy Thompson is a Filipina-American poet and the author of The Everyday, the Mundane, and the Brave (Finishing Line Press, 2019), Driving into Black Mountains (FlowerSong Press, 2020), and An Uprooted Orchid (FlowerSong Press, 2024). She co-edited Boundless 2021, the official anthology of the RGV International Poetry Festival.In her recent work, Sarah Joy explores the gray area of uncertainty, loss, illness, and embodying change. Her confessional poetry style serves as an essential form of therapy, wherein tough journeys turn her attention inward. By leaning into the healing process the body can find true rest and self-appreciation.
