Thirty-Three Hats for Julia

Thirty-Three Hats for Julia, the latest book by poet-physician Dr. Sarah Bein is slated for release by Red Hen Press in January of 2008. This book chronicles Dr. Bein’s experience in medical school at Stanford University and into residency at UCLA, traversing the space between illness and health.

The poems are written both from the perspective of the patient as well as from the perspective of physician, in the hopes of collapsing those boundaries to foster empathy and communication.

Her interest in medicine since the beginning of her career has been with those patients who endure chronic or life-limiting illness, which brought forth her story about Julia, detailed in a prose piece which comprises the third section of this book and is the book’s namesake.

Julia is a girl whose final days she shares, recounting the most sacred moments of her life, as well as conjuring the now-ghosts of a future she will not see. In her thoughts we see her attempt at reason; she looks in metaphor, verse, and abstraction for a cause, an explanation for this last role she plays. She relishes in narrative, in the narrative of her own life and the lives she would have lived, her thirty-three hats. This is where Dr. Bein’s narrative takes on that transformative capacity in its power to invent, through imagination, and with hope, to heal.