Terminalia (First Printing) Poems

A collection of poems by author Daniel Menaker, published by The Portal Press.

In January, Daniel Menaker―former New Yorker fiction editor, Random House editor-in-chief, and author of The Treatment, among many other books―received a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and the twenty-four poems collected in TERMINALIA were written over the course of Menaker’s diagnosis and treatment. The collection chronicles his “long contention with the truth”: that “The illness you’re fighting / And to which you will lose was Written, like this. / But uneditable, inevitable.”

Lauded by Janet Malcolm as “a true comic artist,” Menaker reflects on the long arc of an extraordinary life in verse that’s at once mournful and remarkably, even insistently funny. Writing from the “imaging slab,” “the argot of the docs and lab reports,” and the haze of painkillers, his poems playfully register the humorous and rhetorical possibilities latent in medical and anatomical terminology. Against the “sickness circus” of pandemic-era New York City, Menaker’s account of his private experience of illness stays attuned to both “joy and its twin brother, mourning.” 

Daniel Menaker was the author of seven books, two of them among the New York Times's Best Books of the Year, another an Editors' Choice. He twice won the O. Henry Award for short stories, and his fiction, essays, and reporting appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper's, n+1, Esquire, and many other publications. He also served as an editor at the New Yorker for two decades and as executive editor-in-chief of Random House, working with Alice Munro, George Saunders, Renata Adler, John McPhee, Pauline Kael, Janet Malcolm, David Foster Wallace, and Salman Rushdie.