Scar Tissue

In this, his most revealing and courageous book to date, the widely-acclaimed author of Life on the Hyphen and Next Year in Cuba tells the story of how it is to experience two of the shaping events in our lives--surviving illness, enduring loss--in more than one language. Writing with candor and conviction, Pirez Firmat chronicles, in prose and verse, how the death of his exiled father and his own diagnosis of prostate cancer (a disease from which his father also suffered) brought him to a place he had never been, and he had never left. Much more than a recovery journal, Scar Tissue is an eloquent reflection on the resources for healing and renewal available to those whose lives and loyalties are divided between countries, cultures and languages.