Family History: 2017

Description

A family's history turns on its head when a mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. Beyond the shock of discovering the disease, there are questions raised about genetics - all the more difficult when the mother's an adoptee. For Johanna Emeney, the members of her small, country family were also quickly overwhelmed by the city-based clinical world they found themselves in, and the way it depersonalised the central figure in their lives. In her second collection, Johanna brings her family history to the page - in all its uniqueness and ordinariness - and challenges the medical approach that can forget the person inside the patient.

Johanna Emeney lives with her husband, David, their many cats and a couple of goats on Auckland's North Shore. She works as a tutor at Massey University and as co-facilitator of the Michael King Young Writers Programme. Her poems have been commended and placed third in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and shortlisted for the International Montreal Poetry Prize.