Dramatic and intimate, the poems in Does She Have a Name? trace the journeys of two women-one middle aged, the other her infant granddaughter-through near-mortal encounters with medical crises. Both survive their trials, passing from life to death and back again; both face wrenching, unpredictable challenges; both emerge from years of therapy, made whole but alone, changed by experience in apparent and invisible ways.

Moving from a neonatal intensive care unit's urgent ministrations to the patient work of neurologists and speech pathologists, told from the perspectives of parent, child, husband, and witness, and exploring questions of disability, difference, and the calculated value of human life, Does She Have a Name? is an affecting, provocative book of poems.