Reviews

Following the success of her verse novel, Ophelia's Codpiece, Jayne Fenton Keane's The Transparent Lung is an even more impressive tour-de-force. This contemporary verse drama combines narrative, reflection, soliloquy and performance, into a powerful and empathetic presentation in four voices. It is a politically charged text that engages with the emotional and social terrains of grief, loss and medicine, in an inventive and vital manner.

John Knight, editor, Post Pressed

The Transparent Lung is a fascinating and intricate piece of work. rather like the human lung itself. It deals with the intermeshing of a family's different reactions to the father's life threatening illness. This poem for voices bubbles with fresh imagery and emotional energy and repays close attention to its multiple pathways.

Mike Ladd

A moving account, in verse, of a family changed forever by trauma. Jayne Fenton Keane's poetry sculpts what is ultimately a journey of discovery and growth out of deep loss.

Rebecca Edwards

From the poems to the complexities of the graphs and puzzles, the pure intellectual syllabi of the Transparent Lung is brilliant in its rendition of a family struggling up a rising hill of diagnosis.

Chris Mansel, Muse Apprentice Guild

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Extract

BOOK OF DIAGNOSIS

It was the most important hand he'd ever seen.
The one that picked up the film, two fingers

on an edge, the way a child on yard duty
would pick up his enemy's greasy lunch wrap.

His enemy licked the asphalt, spat on the left
side of the wrapper and smeared the gob.

Serves you right for getting caught smoking, he said
as flashback slapped a memory of bitumen pap

a map of sticky, confectionery wraps,
against a boy's thin, old bicep.

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