Does She Have a Name? (NYQ Books, 2014) is my third collection of poems. Order here.

Dramatic and intimate, the poems in Does She Have a Name? by George Witte trace the journeys of two women– one middle aged, the other her infant granddaughter–through near-mortal encounters with medical crises.  Both survive their trials, passing from life to death and back again; both face wrenching, unpredictable challenges; both emerge from years of therapy, made whole but alone, changed by experience in apparent and invisible ways.    Moving from a NICU unit’s urgent ministrations to the patient work of neurologists and speech pathologists, told from the perspectives of parent, child, husband, and witness, and exploring questions of disability, difference, and the calculated value of human life, Does She Have a Name? is an affecting, provocative book of poems.

Reviews

“Witte has done something extraordinary here.  At once terrifying and heartrending, Does She Have a Name? demonstrates unflinchingly that what lies at the heart of faith is love.  It is a great and important work.”

—Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer

“Witte takes on the subjects of family, medical practice, and physical difference, as a participant witness to tragedy…. In its best moments, the formalism of Witte’s verse heightens its emotional resonance…. In a poem about revisiting his living will during a period of extreme uncertainty, the final, formal lines create a beautiful, ironic tension between bureaucratic tasks and the lives they sustain: “Asleep, our issue shudders in your arms./ I sign in triplicate against more harm.”  —Publishers Weekly