Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses

What nurses know about care giving is different from what doctors and families know. The nurses in this collection talk about inpatients, outpatients, and home patients; these patients’ attendants are young and old, female and, increasingly, male. Some of the nurses are dispassionately efficient; others wickedly admit to the excitement of voyeurism; all have unusual access to the depths and shallows of human emotion. By unsentimentally translating our suffering into prose and poetry, the nurses in Between the Heartbeats performs another enduring act of loving care. The forty-nine registered nurses in this brave, graceful, first-ever anthology represent thousands more. Their words expand the practice of nursing and the practice of language. By beating witness to the intimate details of nursing, from the mundane to the beautiful to the tragic, they reveal the epiphanies of life and death.