"'Patient poets: Illness from inside out' invites readers to consider what caregivers and medical professionals may learn from poetry by patients. It offers reflections on poetry as a particularly apt vehicle for articulating the often isolating experiences of pain, fatigue, changed life rhythms, altered self-understanding, embarrassment, resistance, and acceptance. The chapters discuss poems that represent a particular dimension of the experience of illness or disability -- foreboding, isolation, fear, shame, wry humor, acceptance, deepening self-knowledge." -- Back cover.