Hannah Hodgson is a seriously ill poet, who uses a panoply of vocabularies to evoke the medical, the poetic and professional to explore what illness, death and dying does to a young person, as both patient and witness . 163 Days is the longest hospitalisation she has had to date – and so, with this as a scaffold she charts how medical, legal and personal truths clash as loudly as a dropped tray of instruments in a silent operating theatre.
 
Beyond the ethics and machinery of care, what the diary entries show most movingly is the author’s coming-of-age story, learning both kind and terrible truths which it takes healthy adults a lifetime to amass.

In the ‘aftercare’ poems we see the author embark on a new version of her life as a disabled young person, a hospice user, a body disintegrating, declining to the extent she has seventeen (diagnosed) issues, falling under the branch of her life limiting diagnosis. Readers will be moved, surprised and enlightened by this compelling debut collection of poems.