Fun Being Me

by Jack Wiler

Four years ago, Jack Wiler was hospitalized with AIDS. This book is his attempt to talk about what it is to die and live again. The collection is far more than his struggle with the AIDS virus. Wiler... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0972304592
• ISBN13: 9780972304597
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: CavanKerry Press
• Length: 140 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A descriptive chronicle of all the daily and sometimes trivial nuances of life

AIDS survivor Jack Wiler speaks of his struggle against the virus in Fun Being Me, a work of poetry that also embraces such diverse topics as what it is like to practically die and live again, money, the working life, sex, and the final reality of death. The easygoing, free-verse style treats serious topics with Everyman-style candor. A descriptive chronicle of all the daily and sometimes trivial nuances of life amid the omnipresent, harrowing threat of life's ending. "Sick of Being Sick": I was lying on my back for a month, oh I would get up / to piss or puke, but I mostly / lay and watched tv and / slept and ate. / A skeleton draped with / a ready-made shroud. // Then I began to move about. / To stir as it were in the world. / I might sit in my little white chair / in the shower or move / out to the living room / to receive a reluctant guest / or shuffle out to the / van from the AIDS center / to see a doctor or a nurse.

Oceans and stars and Jack Wiler

Fun Being Me is a book that stretches the imagination of the reader. It is a trip from ill health to stability and from despair to something more like peace. But Jack Wiler is not an ordinary bystander. In fact, in this book of provocative poems, Jack insists that the reader must wake up and think about the world that surrounds all of us. So in "Oceans and Stars," the narrator, unable to sleep through the night, looks up at the stars and realizes they don't negate the "stink of the hold" or "the slow rot of...life." Stars cannot wipe out disease, or the fact that the speaker feels he is "soon to drown...." Still, with those opposing claims, the stars, the ocean of disease and rot waiting to suck each human under, he insist, speaking directly to the reader, "The long night, full of stars, claims you instead." When a realist like Jack expresses gratitude for beauty and for friends, a reader can only feel lfe is richer for reading these poems, and for the chance to think about the big questions of life on this earth.