Complete Physical

Shane Neilson’s accustomed fascination with the two great subjects, love and death, has taken a purely professional interest: he has written a poetry that has fused his typical poetic concerns with that of his profession as a physician. The poems are primarily lyrics, but there is the occasional villanelle and sestina amidst a squalid sea of punchy narrative; all of the poems ponder what it means to be ill, and some of them celebrate what it means to get better. Some poems even consider the tragic point when illness becomes identity. In every poem his ‘patients’ come alive, but the main character is that of the observant doctor, chiding, cheerleading, sometimes just doing his duty.