My son’s illness is eight years old and has no name.

Blue Peninsula

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2006

Buy the Kindle version
Contact Madge

“My son’s illness is eight years old and has no name. It started when he was fourteen. He is now twenty-two. It is taking away his ability to walk and to reason. It is getting worse, some years more rapidly than others.”

These words begin the first section of Blue Peninsula, a narrative of a son’s degenerative illness in thirty-three parts focused around poems that have provided companionship and sustenance to the author. When multiple diagnostic avenues delivered no explanation for the worsening disabilities of her older son, Ike, Madge McKeithen “became a poetry addict–collecting, consuming, ripping poems out of magazines, buying slender volumes that would fit in my pocket or pocketbook, stashing them in loose-leaf notebooks, on shelves, stacking them on the floor. In the midst of all this grief, I had fallen in love. With words. Poems, especially. And just in time.”

McKeithen draws on a wonderfully wide ranging group of poets and lyricists—including Emily Dickinson, the Rolling Stones, Paul Celan, Bruce Springsteen, Marie Howe, Walt Whitman, and many others–to illuminate, comfort, and help to express her sorrow. Some chapters are reflections on friendships and family relationships in the context of a chronic and worsening illness. Some consider making peace with what life has dealt, and others value intentionally reworking it.Not written to suggest easy solace, this powerful work aims to keep company, as would any individual whose loved one is on a course in which the only way out is through.

Keep Reading

An memoir about coping with a child’s chronic illness through poetry, Blue Peninsula was published in 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Students and teachers may enjoy our Reading Guide.

Buy the Kindle version Contact Madge

More Books and Essays

Recourse

(Re) An Ideas Journal, March 2021

Building

Lumina, May 2018

To Uzbekistan and Back

Glassworks, June 2012

A Concern with Space Leads Elsewhere

The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food, April 30, 2012

What Really Happened

The Best American Essays, October 2011

No Apologies

Utne Reader, November/December 2010

The Great Salvific Power

Topograph: New Writing from the Carolinas and the Landscape Beyond, October 2010

What Really Happened

TriQuarterly, vol. 137, July 2010

Summering

Distinction Magazine, July 2010

Here We All Are

The Fayetteville Observer, January 10, 2010

Paul Newman On Sixth Avenue

Lost and Found: Stories from New York, January 2009