Imagine a banister’s absence. That feeling – of suddenly discovered space, of catching one’s breath, of crucial balance – is akin to reading the poems of Nadine St. Louis, who challenges us to leave our roles as mere observers and test our feet on thin tightropes, which afford “support so slender / it could cut.”

Zebra, the retired English professor’s second book of poems, was released last October. The title refers to the old medical school aphorism, “If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” In other words, doctors should assume common causes rather than hastily diagnose rare diseases.

In 2002, after experiencing a slew of unusual symptoms, physicians determined that St. Louis was, in fact, a “medical zebra.” For seven years, St. Louis has lived with neuro-endocrine cancer.

Of the diagnosis, St. Louis says, “It was complicated and maddening. Some people may be able to pretend it isn’t there, or follow through the treatments silently, but I’m too controlling.”

She confronts these new subjects with her steely words, explaining that the restraint of the poetic line affords her even more control over a “world in chaos,” than, say, creative prose. Formulating poetry has always allowed her to hold a subject at arm’s length so she can “see it clearer … see what makes it tick.”

Though her illness is a new theme, St. Louis’s reasons for writing poetry have not changed since her first book of poems, Weird Sisters, was published in 2000. Her writing, she suspects, has matured. St. Louis aims for (and succeeds in) writing poems that are honest, tough, and that combine ideas to uncover meaning naturally. Characteristically, her poems follow a narrative structure and often examine human (and non-human) relationships and encounters. One poem, entitled Shadow, personifies cancer itself as an icy, unwavering presence that “shadows” the speaker.

“You put her / out of your mind, but she follows you, / spilling the salt when you scramble eggs, / overfilling the coffeemaker, / burning toast.”

    St. Louis often learns about herself through her poetry. For example, in the aforementioned poem (and others that deal closely with cancer) she employs the second-person perspective (“you”) as a distancing device. However, she says the impulse to personify is never a surprise. “I talk to my can-opener, for heaven’s sake!” she says.

Humor is also plentiful throughout the book, coloring her landscape of hospital hallways and medical machinery. St. Louis says the phenomenon of confronting a serious subject with humor is well-illustrated in literature. In particular, she recalls the “Riddikulus” spell in Harry Potter, which allows witches and wizards to transform the embodiment of their deepest fears into something laughable. St. Louis uses a similar device to convert what is mundane or somber into something more easily confronted. Through this lens, the sounds of medical instruments become a “classical robot jam” in a poem entitled Magnetic Resonance. “Dig it!” she writes.

 In the last poem of the book, also entitled Zebra, St. Louis unblinkingly examines the strange and beautiful existence of zebras – literally, medically, and metaphorically. In a powerful moment of frankness, she writes, “Life is not all / (you know this) / black and white, / but zebras are.”

What is clear to me is that, while staring “straight into the eye of the beast,” St. Louis’s poetry stands the surest.

    Nadine St. Louis’s book, Zebra, is available at Crossroad Books, 301 S. Barstow St., Eau Claire. The LE Phillips Memorial Public Library will welcome Nadine on March 12, at 7 pm, for a reading from Zebra.