Brief Visits: Sonnets from a Volunteer Chaplain

Susan Palwick, novelist and Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, volunteers four hours a week as a lay chaplain in the emergency room of a local hospital. In The Emergency Department Sonnets, a single volunteer shift unfolds in forty-five sonnets, short poems allowing us to hear the many voices–the patients’, the staff’s, the chaplain’s–of the ER. These stories, snippets of much larger ones, capture both the chaos and the beauty of the dramas unfolding every day in every hospital, where the human search for meaning is driven by stark reminders of mortality.