It’s Probably Nothing* (*or how I learned to stop worrying and love my implants) by Micki Myers is a “memoir in poems” about surviving cancer published by Simon and Schuster (2013). The poems are broken into four “stages,” mimicking the four stages of cancer, though may not actually reflect Myers’s experience (I don’t recall her cancer spreading). The poetry collection is meant to be funny while taking a short look at the life of a cancer survivor.

It’s Probably Nothing is not funny, for the most part. This is bad; the book is advertised as funny–even the coconut bra on the cover suggests some laughs–and is meant to “make you laugh in cancer’s face.” Then again, the fact that it’s not funny is also really good. Laughing about cancer seems rather obnoxious to me, even though I recognize that what people are really saying is that we must laugh at what challenges us in order to not go to a dark, defeatist place. But are dark places really so bad? Myers tries to make the reader laugh about her disturbing genetics:

“When I look up all my female ancestors on Ancestry.com

to see if the rumors are true

–that they all had breast cancer–

I see they’re all marked with a green leaf

instead of a pink ribbon,

which would be far more useful.

Apparently they all died of Dutch elm disease.”

While I emitted a “heh” at the last line of the poem, the sheer overwhelming feeling of an entire “tree” being “rotten,” in a sense, is terrifying. I can’t think of more disturbing news that would make me feel defeated–especially since Myers has young children who will inherit these genetics. What Meyers has written feels more deadly than funny. Relating all deaths to one cause, though, makes the poem more like a punch, which resonated long after I turned the page. I wondered what causes of death are in my own tree, and a book that asks me to think is always one I appreciate.

Instead of funny, the majority of the poems described terrifying experiences I couldn’t have imagined, which impacted me emotionally for days. Myers describes having a sample of tissue taken, which the doctor assures her won’t hurt:

“In fact, this procedure involves

lying belly-down on the table

with your boob hanging through a hole

and squashed between two plates,

head twisted to one side,

while a machine inserts a hollow needle

as thick as a pencil into your breast”

In order to find out if the cancer has traveled to her lymph nodes, Myers must do another test, one that sounds more primitive than I had imagined modern medicine would allow:

“When I say ‘injected into the breast,’ I mean

a nurse rolls up a towel, asks me to bite down on it,

(‘Trust me about this,’ she says),

then pushes a large needle into my nipple.

Into, not through.

Through ain’t got shit on this.”

My negative feelings about these descriptive poems stemmed from the fact that they were more truth that I wanted to know. Such truth is a strength of the collection, though, as not knowing about things that can hurt doesn’t benefit me in any way. Claiming the poems are funny, however, made me ill-prepared for the serious nature of the collection.

If you look back at the poems from which I’ve quoted, you may notice that the line breaks don’t add much in terms of creating meaning or musicality. Some of them read more like prose poems. Some are all clumped together as one large stanza. The point of the book seemed more about communicating Myers’s experiences instead of focusing on language, rhythm, and sound. Had the author paid more attention to these qualities, the poems may have taken on a different tone, something less like a bunch of Tweets. Here is an example of what I mean:

“Cancer’s almost worth it just for the drugs.

Or just the names of the drugs.

I thought this was a nickname

for what they had prescribed me

for a sore throat, a bit of jargon

they used for fun, but the label

on the bottle said Magic Swizzle

and the pharmacist winked

when he handed it to me, saying

‘Lucky you–this stuff is the shit.'”