News at Eleven: Death can also seem pretty absurd

to the living, and [Grace] Paley does not deny the reader an occasional dark chortle, as when she admits to being proud of seeing her diagnosis reported on in the New York Times. The same untitled poem continues with a list of precautions she took, "I have eaten the freshest most/organic and colorful fruits and/vegetables." She thinks, "obviously I have done something wrong," then apologizes: "I am/already old and therefore a little ashamed/to have written this poem full/of complaints against mortality."

from San Francisco Chronicle: Paley's 'Fidelity,' posthumous poems

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