Great Regulars: Where "Stupid Hope" really shimmers is in

the work Shinder produced post-diagnosis, when his mortality had come to the fore. "I remember the shame I felt after the news/of the illness that I was not as lovable/as I thought," he admits in "Afterwards," a meditation on the psychology of illness that moves from desperation to "a kind of beauty" in nine spare lines.

The idea is that disease--or, more accurately, dying--offers its own rites of passage, to which we must pay attention if we are to remain fully alive. Why?

from David L. Ulin: Los Angeles Times: 'Stupid Hope' by Jason Shinder

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