Search results for ""author robert wells""

A story that brings tears to your eyes, in more ways than one. It touches you so much you it makes you want to cross your legs in sympathy - Nev Fountain, writer at Dead Ringers, author of PainkillerRob Wells has spent much of his adult life coping with chronic pain of different kinds - an embarrassing bowel problem in his early 20s, recurring testicular pain in his late 20s and 30s, and back problems requiring spinal surgery in his early 40s. Consistent through these experiences has been a feeling of being passed from pillar to post by the medical community, seemingly at a loss to explain the cause of these issues, or to find a lasting solution for them. This hilarious and brutally frank graphic memoir tells Rob's story, taking us through emergency surgery for a misdiagnosed twisted testicle, the extremes of weight loss and weight gain, the insides of far too many public toilets, and having to resort to walking with a cane. As Rob's back, sack and crack all became causes for concern so too did his brain, as his recurring problems unsurprisingly left him with depression and agoraphobia.This is the warm and witty story of a man's battle with his own body, and with the medical industry that couldn't quite appreciate the problem. For anyone who has ever felt let down by their doctors, or who has suffered with chronic pain that shows no sign of subsiding, Rob Wells bravely invites you to really get to grips with his balls.

Read more less

The title poem of this collection, Robert Wells's first since the Collected Poems and Translations of 2009, revisits in memory the site of the once great Etruscan city of Veii. There as a child the poet discovered an incised potsherd: 'Was that the day when antiquity / – The place where all is over and done – / Took ineluctable hold of me?' The poems return to familiar places and themes from a later 'now', a revised perspective: memories are real, perhaps more vivid than before, but further off, measuring time and age. Ancient coins abound. In 'The Coin Cabinet' they are conjured in their variety by means of a series of epithetic evocations, so that one does not doubt their reality, or the complex mythology they evoke and the economy rooted in long traditions and rich in known, shared narratives. 'Robert Wells's language is exact, the experience of the poem is deeply gone through,' Thom Gunn wrote, 'there is a constant desire to adhere to the truth as he apprehended it rather than to glamorize it. The inexpressible becomes expressed.'

Read more less