Examining Room

Spooner offers a poetry collection about addiction and recovery.

The author, an addiction medicine specialist, offers a glimpse into the opioid crisis in Vancouver, British Columbia, via poems dedicated to her living and deceased patients. In “My Boy Is Gone,” the author juxtaposes the heartbreaking work of informing a mother that her 26-year-old son has overdosed with the quotidian concerns of her own 16-year-old son, who simply wants to know what’s for dinner. In “Darkness,” she describes how, in session, “I ask into the deeper layers / pieces of childhood darkness fall out onto the floor,” and learns that her patient witnessed his mother’s overdose; he later suffers the same fate. Another patient makes the case for weaning off opioid agonist therapy in “I Want Off the Stuff,” only to die from an overdose after he does so. Spooner catalogs the outlandish excuses a person with substance use disorder resorts to when contacted about a missed appointment in “Phone Call.” The author considers the many sources of dopamine hits, from drugs and gambling to sugar and sex, in “Distraction.” She concludes with “Mantra,” which includes a plea to “hear the testimony of suffering / don’t turn away / from the struggles.” Spooner acutely depicts the gut-wrenching nature of addiction treatment in this brief but effective book. Her compassion is genuine in lines like “I can’t tell you much about my life / but I will tell you / yours matters to me.” She also encourages agency in lines such as “Decide your one precious life / deserves to climb up / and out // into the light.” Some poems, like the stream-of-consciousness “Listen,” fall victim to 12-step cliches. (“Don’t try to navigate using someone else’s map this is how you get lost.”) The collection’s structure—four sections titled after Stoicism’s virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom—unnecessarily complicates a body of poems that pack a punch with their sparse, no-holds-barred intimacy.

A powerful and empathetic poetry collection.