UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology FALL 2024 and ANNUAL REPORT - Flipbook - Page 23
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UCLA RADIATION ONCOLOGY JOURNAL
WE ARE ALL
CONNECTED
A friend loaned me Kelli Russell Agodon’s second book, Small Knots, in 2008, and I
was struck by how despite subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) addressing mental
health, imperfection, and ephemerality, her poems left me feeling more comfortable
within my very human skin, with my very human flaws. Her 2014 Hourglass Museum
solidified me as a fan, and her 2021 book with the esteemed Copper Canyon Press,
Dialogues with Rising Tides, blew me out of a pandemic-era fog, made me question
how I could approach the world around me in a kinder way. Copper Canyon will
publish her next collection, Accidental Devotions, in 2025.
A Pacific Northwest native, Agodon now lives a ferry ride from Seattle in a small
community of less than 2,000 people although she continues to travel, very recently
returning from Greece where she ran into a couple she knows from her home
community while at a “dive restaurant not in the main part of town.” She sees
this as synchronicity: “For me, the whole world is connected,” she tells me as we
begin discussing her work, and she lives by the motto: “do no harm.” She shares an
experience from about fifteen years ago of a family member eating leftovers she’d
intended to eat. In a state of “hangry,” she drove to her local grocery store for food, and
it wasn’t until she was back in her car and had eaten something that she realized the
effect she’d unintentionally had on others: no one had interacted with her and in fact
moved away from her, and even the checker who was usually very talkative would not
look her in the eye. “I created that experience,” she shares. “It made such an impact on
me.”
That experience—and her empathic nature—loom from her poems. In “Magpies
Recognize Themselves in the Mirror,” she writes “I watched a woman having a
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