The pink ribbon, that ubiquitous emblem of breast cancer awareness, has long been an object of controversy and derision, but the poet and essayist Anne Boyer doesn’t just pull it loose, unfastening its dainty loop; she feeds it through a shredder and lights it on fire, incinerating its remains ... extraordinary and furious ... [Boyer's] story, told with searing specificity, is just one narrative thread in a book that reflects on the possibility—or necessity—of finding common cause in individual suffering.

... a rousing hybrid of memoir and manifesto ... It's...incandescent rage that animates The Undying, and situates it alongside current literature on feminist anger...as well as recent illness memoirs...critical of a medical establishment that frequently refuses to take women's concerns seriously and punishes non-compliance ... Not long ago, publishers assumed readers wanted whitewashed, upbeat stories about breast cancer, and the market was flooded with cutesy, cringe-inducing titles, like Big C Little Ta-Ta, Let Me Get This Off My Chest and Killer Boobs. Boyer's intervention into this genre feels like crossing the Rubicon ... This is memoir as anti-capitalist indictment, as biting cultural criticism, as vengeance. It suggests a new era in the politics of breast cancer, one that might look less like corporate sponsored marathons every October and more like the radical, confrontational AIDS activism of the 1980s. Arriving the year before an election that could set healthcare and disability policy for decades, The Undying warns us of the human costs of any system that prioritizes profit over lives.

... not so much a cancer memoir as it is a flag burning. It is a work fueled by rage — against cancer, sure, but also against culture, and against the world which made her sick. It is an interrogation of everything that is difficult to look at directly ... Like Sontag at her best, Boyer is able to shed light on a darkness where most don’t dare to tread ... Her prose cracks and sparks, perhaps like only a poet’s can ... each page feels unmatched in its urgency, especially when she is ruminating on the writings of Aristedes and the 17th century metaphysical poet John Donne. Boyer is a library, and her ability to not just argue with canonical authors most of us fell asleep learning about, but to do so with an intellectual alacrity that makes those authors feel dreadfully important, is stunning ... The essays in The Undying are dizzying in their heights and angles. Boyer throws everything at the wall ... Boyer does not for a moment pull a punch, whether it be for cancer fetishists, vloggers, the sickbed, or for the systemic violence of capitalism that creates banal statistics ... The deep ambivalence Boyer feels for her engagement with her subjects drives the book forward in a way that is refreshingly grounded ... Anne Boyer carefully balances autobiography and theoretical argument with an action-forward method of engagement that shows intellectuals can have a place in our world. The Undying is a masterwork of uncompromising essays that proves an author can write stylishly about difficult subjects, with difficult citation, while encouraging real engagement. There are few authors that can pull off what Boyer has done in The Undying, and fewer still that would be willing to try. By its end, the rage that fueled Boyer is rightfully, inevitably felt by her reader, and as such might radicalize us to ask the question: what do we do now with this rage?

...[a] crystalline memoir of illness and the hard knowledge that illness provides ... Boyer would refuse the heroism that description implies, as she refuses 'the angel of epiphany' that readers want from 'the story of cancer.' She’s right. We need writers of illness to challenge our fears and desires, what we want cancer’s excessive suffering and immoderate treatment to mean ... Boyer records how her illness exposes this world’s workings: its injustices, inequities, and profit motives. This process of exposure is radical and radicalizing ... Writing illness as Boyer does is a mercy: she invites us into this education in how everything breaks into nothing. The writer offers herself into this difficulty, and her readers receive what she’s learned of us.

...beautiful ... The Undying is the spellbinding result of a brilliant mind confined to the sickbed, facing the destruction of her body and her routine life. Informing every element of the text is the question of what literature can 'do' for the living and the dying; what art, as a whole, is obligated to do in the service of the world ... What Boyer’s cancer reveals from inside her, with radical intimacy, is the infiltration of capitalism within our very bodies ... The Undying is another refusal, of equal eloquence and poignance ... The explicit challenge of The Undying is to find a way to write about breast cancer that does not merely replicate existing narratives, nor add to the din of 'awareness' ... Boyer writes with such power, grace, and economy that The Undying is nearly impossible to put down ... If chemotherapy is a 'total strike' — destroying gray matter, hair follicles, digestion, memory, speech processing, bone density, and the muscles around the heart, to name only a few — The Undying is an equally thorough and devastating rejoinder ... It would be a mistake to take The Undying’s tone of cool remove for anything except rage at the injustices wrought by a world Boyer loves ... Yet the reader can never forget how much pain she went through to write this book. She wants to tell the truth, not grant readers the voyeur’s moral pluralism ... Though there are certainly people who willingly consume cancer narratives, many more will be repelled by such an ostensibly sad book. She can’t afford for this to happen. Capitalism wants you to ignore your body until it cries out. And who are the ones in the most pain? The poor, the exhausted. Her un-dying will not be for nothing.

[Boyer] refuses to write in the cheery, pink-ribbon style, to use the word struggle, to praise the medical establishment for the treatment advances it has made ... an examination of how to write (or not) about breast cancer and at the same time an elegant, devastating example of such writing ... Boyer resumes the self-reflexive, episodic style she explored in her previous books, only now with a more explicitly narrative form ... Boyer is merely sliding away the rose-colored glass to show us what lies behind it—misogynist and racist, brutal and mercenary, distributing suffering and death unequally by class, this is the world we have made ... Breast cancer, Boyer insists, cannot be understood as an ahistorical sameness, an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells. It is, rather, a socially and historically constructed nebula, and the women who have it do not suffer from the illness alone. They suffer from the world.

The Undying...resists neat platitudes, easy images, and formal closure ... in The Undying there is no one story, one idea, one direction, one clause or cause, reason or remedy, message or moral ... her writing is singular—as in exceptional, forceful, brilliant ... The Undying is not the story of cancer as the dominant culture has taught us to tell or hear or imagine or understand it. It is anything but. In form, it is multiple, wayward, fragmented, rebellious, lucid, furious, beautiful, disorienting, unhappy, profound, painful, exquisite, precise, abstract, unfathomable ... As one of the undying, having lived through a battered and disabling process in order to keep living, and now still missing parts of her former self, Boyer harnesses language and form to produce a body of writing that creates, embodies, and produces the effects of its own conditions—even when the form this takes on the page is a utopian book, the one she wants to exist, wants to write[.]

In The Undying, Boyer’s politics have not slackened at all but her ambivalence about writing is gone ... The passive voice approximates the scary momentum of a medical decision that is supposedly yours to make but doesn’t feel like it; Boyer’s straightforward description, to the extent that it shocks, reveals how accustomed you are to the health care industry’s evasions and euphemisms. Here and everywhere in The Undying, her insistence on the specificity of her bodily experience makes you viscerally aware of your own ... That experience is largely made of sensations, and Boyer is excellent at describing—and in describing, transmitting—them ... You shiver or at least tense up when she writes, about the effects of chemotherapy ... To read The Undying is not to see pictures in your mind but to feel feelings in your body. In this way, the book echoes the work of somatic poets like CAConrad and Bhanu Kapil, whose writing includes exercises that are meant to be done, or that the authors have done, in the world outside of the poem. Like their work, Boyer’s writing explicitly uses language as a bridge from body to body. It is this transmission of sensation that most effectively cuts through the blur of information and images that obscure, often deliberately, the reality of cancer and so much else ... The Undying is enchanted ... Where Boyer’s previous work sometimes presented writing as a useful tool, it becomes here, in its enchanted state, a fundamental necessity divorced from notions of utility[.]

Anne Boyer’s The Undying is a book about illness that doesn’t fit easily into...categories. A reader enters it expecting a memoir about Boyer’s journey through a diagnosis of and treatment for breast cancer but quickly learns that the book (despite the publisher’s classification on the back cover) does not intend to meet such an expectation ... it is really a manifesto, declaring that the telling of a single story is in fact a lie, an act that elides the full sinister horror of the system of cancer ... Although Boyer resists the memoir genre, and rages at it, she inevitably writes inside of it. This wrestling against her own—or any singular—experience, which gives her book its power, occasionally cripples her; she dodges and weaves out of the way of her story so much that she sometimes risks losing her reader’s attention. She is aware of this, however, and lets her resistance show, so that the reader in turn finds herself questioning how her own need for a coherent story implicates her in the systems she is reading about ... Boyer is angry, and she makes it clear that all of us should be. The Undying is slippery and elusive in its very form, and you come away feeling that the book itself encapsulates the frustration with the inadequacies of our existing modes for tackling anything of this size.

This struggle is not for the faint of heart, and many of the contradictions Boyer unravels are designed to reassure, minimize, and compartmentalize, in effect, to isolate cancer away from the rest of life ... If you’ve ever helped to care for someone with cancer, you will recognize in this book the answers to lingering questions that never felt right, and the great luck of having friends who are willing to participate in art-making, bullshit-detecting, and black humor ... There are so many sharp and fiercely specific moments in this book, but I don’t want to overlook the significance of its form. Boyer’s work has a way of making individual experience less lonely, and the very structure of this book presents an alternative to the rarefied, isolating spaces of cancer care ... Reading The Undying feels like inhabiting the kind of temple Boyer once wanted to create — a temple for the individual and public acknowledgement of suffering, and also a temple for collectively examining the lies she sets out to untangle ... Every sentence of this book has something to say, under pain of death, about the truths artistic excellence can unleash.

The Undying is like a 'make your own adventure' book, but Boyer, now in remission, plays it out first, to help you in case you too face your mortality but get a second chance ... The Undying wants to be about everything, somewhat like Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie ... we learn that she taught full time during her treatment, but little of that experience makes it into the book’s insistent internal monologue. What does appear is astonishing ... The book knows not all exploitation and exposure are the same, but it also insists on the commons of suffering. People will have conflicting, maybe roiling, responses to its various claims that cancer is the world’s fault, that cancer is democratic ... I think any reader, but certainly I, would also feel lost in the middle of so many middles that compose Boyer’s book. I was muddled, but I coasted, then on multiple readings took in multiple cliffhangers, falls, rages, and arcs of stated and implied desire. That was more than okay. Spend time in the room with this ... All illness memoirs are conversion narratives in that sense, showing how some captive person became another kind of being. Maybe, in the solitary confinement of survival in the world that is also crowded, the story of her adaptation can be converted into a resource for yours.

There is a sardonic irony in Anne Boyer’s The Undying being published so close to October, also known as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, since she skewers the inadequacy and hypocrisy of this once-well-intentioned marketing ploy. On the other hand, the honesty and accuracy of her book in capturing the disorientation of breast cancer and its treatment deserves to be heard at the zenith of pinkwashing ... These complexities are downright refreshing for breast cancer patients and survivors to see articulated on the page, but they’re illuminating for non-sufferers, as well, whose good intentions of sending books about cancer patients and endless treatment advice ring hollow and tone deaf. How would they learn without hearing a blisteringly honest account such as this? ... Highlighting these truths is the greatest contribution of Boyer’s book, and she does so without being didactic or producing a screed. Instead, The Undying shares the many sides of breast cancer in poetic prose, almost dreamlike reflections that capture the dissociated mode of thinking that comes with treatment by poison, the threat of early death, and having your entire life suddenly upended ... [Boyer] writes of the incredible pain and exhaustion, but in a stream-of-consciousness style that is weighty enough to convey the message, yet lyrical enough to entrance the reader. Perhaps only a poet like Boyer could express these many absurdities in a way that is still beautiful. The Undying is a cathartic read for breast cancer patients and survivors, and anyone caught in the relentless machine of treatment, suffering, and withstanding the ordeal. But it’s equally valuable for allowing the uninitiated to peer behind the pink ribbon and the tropes and, instead, see what so many parts of our society can’t or won’t countenance about this disease.

... ambitious in scope, is honed to a precision that feels hard-won ... The politics of illness have rarely been limned with such clarity and grace. One of Boyer’s many gifts is for framing and juxtaposition, vividly exposing connections between structural injustice and personal suffering.

Boyer’s engagement with her sources ensures that The Undying, though it is a narrative in the first person, is only minimally autobiographical ... What stands out about The Undying, several decades later and in the wake of a dramatic proliferation of cancer memoirs, is the affect and intensity of its linguistic virtuosity ... Perhaps the real problem with the symbolic language around cancer is its insistent sameness: pink ribbons signify breasts, breasts signify women. The sheer abundance of Boyer’s metaphors, by contrast, captures something important about the persistent wiliness of the disease.

Unlike a memoirist, Boyer does not tell a story. Her work of critique privileges metaphor in conveying its message, and it aspires to literature, not testimony ... What happens when literature is not, following Aristotle, an imitation of 'men in action'? What happens when, instead, it creates the experience of being one among many women who are subjected to extractive economic and legal systems designed by wealthy men? In a wry, oracular voice, she answers these questions by blending personal narrative, political discourse, historical investigation, and literary examination to reveal the political and economic structures that multiply suffering for patients. She seeks to separate art from artifice, and to demystify who holds power in our world ... These moments of intimacy are often humorous, a way to insist that this book was not written to elicit a readers’ pity, or compassion for Boyer as an individual patient, but to draw our attention outward, to the political and social structures that shape sickness. In many illness memoirs, we stay close to the first-person narrator throughout the story, becoming consumed by our own empathic responses to their struggles. Boyer resists this reading; her own experience is a touchstone rather than propeller. She is critical, and her critiques glint with truth. Yet, as someone whose mother died of breast cancer, I found that her quick forays into personal detail drew me closer to Boyer’s literary persona. I couldn’t help but care. That said, some of Boyer’s most memorable writing emerges in her critique of the 'pinkwashed' landscape of breast cancer survivorship ... The book’s force...comes from its complex form. Each chapter reads like a series of prose poems, and relies heavily on metaphor to explore its questions ... The fragmented chapters can be disorienting: at times, in paragraphs dense with metaphor, critique, dream, and anecdote, I found it difficult to remember where I was in Boyer’s narrative timeline. This stylistic choice risks alienating readers who aren’t familiar with how to approach an 'experimental' text ... Boyer does her best to offer signposts as to how to navigate the book throughout. If you stay with her, the effect of her prose is astonishing.

The scope of her critique is astounding, ranging from the history of the pink ribbon to staggering statistics about survival rates for various populations of women based on factors like race, class, marital status, and sexuality. Formally inventive, The Undying stays true to the Boyer’s proclamation partway into the book, 'Ido not want to tell the story of cancer in the way I have been taught to tell it.' The structure of the book is surprising and addictive; the sections are split into chapters and the chapters have interludes of tangential thoughts or ideas jotted down in the midst of illness. It reads like the organized chaos of a brilliant mind fogged by illness and treatment ... Boyer’s unadorned description of inhabiting a sick body leaves the reader aching.

She faces the topic of cancer head on. And in doing so, she made me realize that what I thought I knew about the disease was really just a reflection of it ... Boyer is interested in documenting the realities of suffering the way a critic might document the events of a movie ... There’s an urgency to the writing in this book that keeps delicacy out. It changes the framework we give to sickness. There is no pre- and post-disease when one person’s diagnosis bleeds into another’s and another’s ... Often the short sections end with discouraging details left hanging without observation. It’s like the writer is opening doors, letting our reactions sit in the silence of hers ... Even if analysis of these details is sometimes left to just the facts themselves, The Undying achieves unflinching directness.

...[Boyer's] writerly perspective is unique, and she brings to this elegant and eviscerating memoir a poet’s sharp anguish that cuts like a righteous blade through the familiar bland heroics of the breast cancer 'industry' ... Calling upon the works of Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, and Susan Sontag, Boyer insists on a reconsideration of how we treat the diagnosed and discuss the diagnosis. She rails against false hope and challenges the theatrics of feel-good fundraising, while casting a baleful eye at those who tout awareness as opposed to tackling the dirty work of trying to determine what causes the disease. Call it a battle cry, call it a fury-fueled elegy, call it the work of a woman who will not be denied. In every way, The Undying should not be missed.

...a beautiful memoir ... This memoir lays bare Boyer’s pain and exhaustion and is stacked with revelatory observation ... Boyer’s gorgeous language elevates this artful, piercing narrative well above the average medical memoir.

A passionate and eloquent memoir ... [Boyer] takes us on a deeply personal journey ...Told with brutal clarity, this is a haunting testimony about death that is filled with life.