Codeine Diary

This memoir of hemophilia is intensely personal and impressionistic, shifting back and forth in time between the author’s recovery from a bleed episode in 1989 and accounts of his childhood. Among the issues he deals with are his guilt for having survived both his brother, who died of kidney disease in 1980, and the nine out of ten hemophiliaces who’ve been stricken by HIV and AIDS. The author is an award-winning poet, and his prose here is lyrical and highly original, approaching issues of illness and family in fresh and deeply affecting ways. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.