From Publishers Weekly
A skilled horsewoman and lifelong athlete, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Kumin (Quit Monks or Die!) was 73 in July 1998 when a riding accident left her with two broken vertebrae in her neck. Although 95% of such injuries are fatal, Kumin survivedAonly to face overwhelming odds that she would be paralyzed for the rest of her life. Miraculously, however, she was walking again within weeks of the accident; now, though one hand and an arm remain partially immobilized, her life has largely resumed its normal course. Here is the journal of her first nine months of recovery: a slow process in which she regains sensation in a toe or heel, struggles to put one foot in front of the other and is liberated from her catheter. Largely a story of pain and frustration, and of milestones that impressed her medical team but seemed to signal inordinately slow progress to Kumin herself, the volume also serves as a paean to the supportive family members, friends and fellow patients who helped her through the ordeal. The "halo" of the book's title was a very real immobilizing metal cage in which her head was enclosed for nearly three months. A profoundly uncomfortable device that induced claustrophobia and made sleeping impossible without the aid of narcotics, the halo saved Kumin's life by allowing her broken neck to heal; she makes it a symbol of both the positive and negative aspects of the recovery process. Candid about the many tribulations that accompany recovery from a serious injury, Kumin also meditates on how one can take a life that's interrupted with brutal abruptness and put it back together again. As such, this account offers both honesty and hope to others who face such traumatic experiences. (June) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Anne Roiphe
Inside the Halo and Beyond serves as a silhouette against the horizon, resonating wisdom while announcing a triumph of body and soul.


Carolyn Heilbrun
Here is a singular story of survival, an earthly miracle wrought by family devotion, gardens, horses, guts. A compelling read.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In July 1998, when Maxine Kumin's horse bolted at a carriage-driving clinic, she was not expected to live. Yet, less than a year later, her progress pronounced a miracle by her doctors, she was at work on this journal of her astonishing recovery. She tells of her time "inside the halo," the near-medieval device that kept her head immobile during weeks of intensive care and rehabilitation, of the lasting "rehab" friendships, and of the loving family who always believed she would heal.

Author Biography: Maxine Kumin lives in New Hampshire. Among her many awards are the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

FROM THE CRITICS

Anne Roiphe

[S]he resonates wisdom while announcing a triumph of body and soul. —New York Times Book Review

Carolyn Heilbrun

Here is a singular story of survival, an earthly miracle wrought by family devotion, gardens, horses, guts. A compelling read.

Richard Selzer

Maxine Kumin brings the sensitivity and imagination of a poet to her extraordinary ordeal.

Abraham Verghese

From a singular experience she has created a lesson that is universal, which, it seems to me, is the essence of being a poet.

Anne Roiphe - The New York Times Book Review

The book describes Kumin's recovery in language that is both precise and spare. She does not wallow in ghastly details or bring us in so close we need to feel embarrassed for her or ourselves. Her books of poetry portray the everyday, the natural world and our part in it. The personal vision that animates her poems fills these pages too...[it] It bears no relation to the confessional storyor the cathartic prose of so many survivors of terror. There is an absence of hysteria...the book won my friendship and admiration for this so sorely tested writer...

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Maxine Kumin brings the sensitivity and imagination of a poet to her extraordinary ordeal. — Richard Selzer, M.D., author of The Doctor Stories

Carolyn G. Heilburn

Compelling...powerfully moving...A singular story of survival. — Carolyn Heilburn, author of Writing a Woman's Life