Brief Visits

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 Brief Visits , 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