The Only Card in a Deck of Knives

In these poems, Turner aims to reclaim the "hysterical" label given to women throughout history. Rather than shy away from the emotional urgency and raw vulnerability surrounding a terminal diagnosis, she shines an interrogative light upon it. Fascinated and repelled by the societal impulse to gussy up diseases that take violent, sometimes deadly, tolls upon women's bodies, she uses these poems to juxtapose the violence of a gendered illness with the violence encountered by women in society.