Die Unsterblichen

An angry manifesto against the treatment of illness, awarded the most prestigious American literary prize.

One week before her 41st birthday, the award-winning poet Anne Boyer is diagnosed with highly aggressive breast cancer. For the single mother, who struggles from paycheck to paycheck, this catastrophic illness prompts a rethinking of mortality and the gender politics of sickness. Boyer begins to confront cancer and society's response to it through writing.

"The Undying" is both a harrowing account of a survivor and a sweeping examination of illness in the 21st century. Anne Boyer references ancient dream diaries, analyzes the commodification of modern healthcare, engages with conspiracy theories surrounding cancer, discusses pain and how to talk about it, and explores self-proclaimed dolorists who advocate for pain, cancer fetishists, and the lies of large corporations; she reinterprets John Donne, discovers that her chemotherapy drug was produced as mustard gas over a hundred years ago, and ultimately finds answers in the literature of other authors who have written about their illnesses and impending death: Kathy Acker, Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf.

Transcending all genre boundaries, Anne Boyer has written a deeply moving and poetic book about illness in contemporary capitalism.