“We paddled these people across the street in a canoe,
                   one by one.
                   We carried them up eight flights of stairs
                   to the parking garage roof.
                   We’re waiting for helicopters they told us would be here.
                   ARDS-man just croaked.
                   My hands are sore from squeezing that bag.
                   I kept him alive for four days
                   and now he’s kicked the bucket on the motherfucking roof
                   because the helicopters haven’t come.
                   Little old Lady’s chest is too stiff to move.
                   The bag just won’t push it up and down anymore.
                   She’s toast.
                   Too much water on the inside
                   nothing but water on the outside,
                   and not even a diet coke to drink.
                   I’m just going to sit here.
                   I’m just going put my heads in my hands.
                   I’m just going to let my shoulders shake.
                   I’m not crying.
                   I’m too dry.”

-          Excerpted from “Charity After The Hurricane”

When Eastern religions refer to Western society as a “culture of death” it

is not merely our fetish sizing of commodities; that is, the emotional relationships we develop with objects which are inanimate, but also our contradictory obsession of somehow avoiding death (“I don’t want to grow up”/”Stay Young At Heart”/”Nurturing the inner child”) while simultaneously devouring images of death, real or depicted, in every aspect of our media.

          So if art, and by extension poetry, serves as an over-glorified mating call for the creative, then it also necessarily serves as a means by which to process death into the fabric of our existence.

          Jan Steckel has the unique perspective of being both a Pushcart nominated poet and an Ivy League educated and trained doctor.  She has seen the spectacle unfold from both the artistic and scientific goggles, and simply as someone who has had to work trying to save other people’s lives:

                   “When I was a senior resident in pediatrics,
                   I discovered that if my nails were pretty on call nights,
                   no one on my floor would die…
                   …I confided the manicure’s death-forestalling power
                   to the other female residents.
                   Soon blood-red fingernails and toenails too,
                   appeared on every ward. ‘If your nails are pretty…’
                   we would say and wink on rounds.”

-          excerpted from “Hard as Nails”

It may be a stereotype that personnel who work in the medical field and/or services are more acutely aware, and perhaps practical when it comes to their mortality and sexuality.  But you know what they say about stereotypes, and Ms. Steckel’s dozen plainsong poems here will not undermine the truth inherent in that particular perception.

                   “When my little love lay under me, she became
                   a vixen fouler-mouthed than any stevedore.
                   ‘Fuck me harder!
                   Make me your whore!’
                   She was trying to talk to a man in me
                   a rapist who wasn’t there.
                   I didn’t understand talking dirty.
                   It left me merely bewildered.

                   But I would thrust my whole hand in
                   and pound her as hard as she wanted it.
                   I would push her further, harder,
                   until she screamed with pleasure,
                   and ordered me to do it deeper, more.
                   Once or twice her paper thin tissues tore,
                   terrifying me when my hand came out bloody.

-          exerpted from “Harder”

Indeed, few other professions provide more practical, everyday insight into the connections between sex and death.

          Like fellow Zeitgeist press author (and good friend) Julia Vinograd, Ms. Steckel brings an accomplished poets eye to her unique niche in life; in her case the niche of pediatrician, counselor, emergency room worker and lover, and crafts thoughtful, streamlined poetry that transcends all those definitions in a manner easily engaged, but not so easily dismissed, by the reader.

-Paul Corman-Roberts