What does it mean to care for someone? This is a question we consider when looking at literature through the lens of health humanities and one of the questions implicit in the poetry collection, Everything Is Water by Chelsea Krieg. Throughout these poems, the idea of “care” appears in different contexts: care of the sick, care for a daughter by a mother, care of the self, and care for the natural world. If we assume a definition like the one offered by scholar Rachel Adams, “Care is work, an attitude toward others, and an ethical ideal,” we can apply a health humanities context to this work, extending the possibilities for our understanding of what it means to caregive (20).
In a villanelle titled “Take Two Tablets by Mouth Every Four Hours as Needed,” we see how the form mirrors the repetitious nature of caring. On a superficial level, the poem is about administering pills, supporting Adams’s notion of care as work, but through the repeated lines, we see words like “hollow” and “swallow” shapeshift as the poem progresses. Hollow can be the actual cavernous space inside the human body or the emptiness of space not filled, and by the poem’s end, the caregiver is the one who’s literally hollowed out from the toil of administering care. “Swallow” is used similarly. In its traditional form, it means “to ingest,” as in swallowing a pill, but in contexts a reader might also infer, more gently, that the caregiving threatens to swallow up the caregiver. As readers, we are left with the reminder that, in the administration of care, few things are ever straightforward.
Other poems represent care more obliquely. In “Mother’s Hymn,” the act of a mother caring for a baby is represented by the image of a mother elephant providing comfort to a dying calf: “And her mother / slides a trunk across the calf’s skin, soothes / until the rasp of breathing quiets. . . ” (Krieg, 25). We stay with the elephant mother in her grief until the final stanza, where the speaker of the poem shows us her own daughter playing with a plastic elephant. Like many of Krieg’s poems, “Mother’s Hymn” is quietly elegiac about the trials of motherhood: “…When a child dies, a mother’s hymn / is low. But it is so clear. / The earth trembles.”
More than hinted, the protective urge is presented as nearly feral. It underlies the impossible circumstances faced by most caregivers, which is that they often cannot cure despite their deep desire to offer curative help, thus care, while required, feels insufficient. The love of a caregiver is often raw and unrestrained as feeling, even if the actions provided might be seen as ordinary and pedestrian. Thus, the poem becomes a place to work out this uncomfortable dichotomy, allowing both poet and reader to make complicated sense of impossible situations.
The moon is a motif that recurs throughout Everything Is Water with the consistency of refrain, but as with her earlier use of language, Krieg resists fixing it to a single meaning. In “Tumor as Wolf Moon,” the moon appears as cold witness, glaring “through the window like / a wide open eye,” a counterpoint to the patient’s own eyes, pale and closed (Krieg, 36). It watches; it does not intervene. One poem later, in “Marriage Counseling Without Teeth,” the moon becomes a figure that licenses action: “I want to scream and hiss like a barn owl / under the full moon” (Krieg, 37). In the space between poems, the moon as image moves through its own lunar phases, from a object imposed upon the caregiver to a subject the caregiver can inhabit. It is a quiet structural argument about what caregiving feels like from the inside: witnessed, then feral; constrained, then briefly, wildly free.
Perhaps Krieg needs the moon—ancient, extramedical, ungovernable—to say what the clinical world has no language yet to describe, a great argument for how poetry rseponds healthcare. Though the moon does not produce light, it reflects it, making it apt for the often unacknowledged roles caregivers assume in the healthcare system. However, the clinical world is catching up. As Jadalla et al. have noted:
In recent years, increased attention has been given to family caregivers. Often, caregiving involves significant amounts of time and energy, and requires the performance of tasks that may be physically, emotionally, socially, or financially demanding. Although caregivers report many positive aspects of providing care, complex care is a stressor and leads to negative consequences that are referred to as caregiver strain and burden (31).
It’s an observation that aligns with Krieg’s premise. If, as we started, Adams identifies care as work, orientation toward another, and an ethical ideal, Everything Is Water fits all three parts of that definition, and in doing so, makes a quiet argument that the caregiver’s voice is not supplementary to health humanities but central.
Works Cited
Adams, Rachel. “Care.” Keywords for Health Humanities, edited by Sari Altschuler, Jonathan M. Metzl, and Priscilla Wald, NYU Press, 2023, p. 20.
Jadalla, Ahlam, et al. “Family Caregiver Strain and Burden: A Systematic Review of Evidence-Based Interventions When Caring for Patients with Cancer.” Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing, vol. 24, no. 1, Feb. 2020, pp. 31–50. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1188/20.CJON.31-50.
Krieg, Chelsea. Everything Is Water. TRP: The University Press of SHSU, 2026.
Image: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
