No Obvious Distress: A John Murray Original

’Funny, moving, wise and constantly surprising’ Martin Chilton, Independent Memoir of the Month

’Astonishing. These poems glimmer with a white-hot beauty that is hard won, and that sings’ Sarah Ruhl

’Striking, surprising, and technically excellent, the poems resonate way beyond their endings’ Roger Robinson
Patient is a normal appearing woman in no obvious distress.

On an ordinary day, out with her three-year-old in the park, Amanda Quaid received a life-changing call - the back pain she had been living with for years was actually a rare and aggressive form of cancer. In an instant, life became a series of sterile rooms, medical charts and body-altering treatments which completely upend Amanda’s marriage, work and family life as she knows it.

Poetry became a lifeline for Amanda, a form to organize the chaos and pain of day-to-day life into order and beauty. In inventive and arresting poems that explore desire, marriage, motherhood and mortality, No Obvious Distress is a powerful memoir-in-verse about Amanda’s unique experience. But it is also a tender, witty and universal collection that asks how we can continue to live and love in times of uncertainty.

Amanda Quaid is a poet, playwright and actress living in New York City. ’Patient and Daughter Appear Closely Bonded’ won the 2023 Bridport Prize for Poetry and subsequent work has been a finalist for the Philadelphia Stories’ National Prize in Poetry, longlisted for the UK’s National Poetry Competition and published in Rattle (where Amanda won the Ekphrastic Challenge contest), DMQ Review, and Dead End. Her first opera, The Extinctionist, was praised by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The play on which it was based was a finalist in the Tennessee Williams One-Act Play Contest.