Poetry. Selected for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. The poems in psychiatrist Richard M. Berlin's second collection, SECRET WOUNDS, explore the emotional terrain of doctor-patient relationships and how doctors' vulnerabilities and psychological scars become the secret wounds they must bear.

"(Although) Berlin's subject matter is inherently interesting...medicine is not the excuse for these poems; it is simply their occasion...Berlin's poems are sure, spare, and always open to the task of revealing the mysteries he is privy to."—Gary Young

Author City: RICHMOND, MA USA

Richard M. Berlin received his undergraduate and medical education at Northwestern University. The winner of numerous poetry awards, his first collection of poems How JFK Killed My Father (Pearl Editions, 2003) won the Pearl Poetry Prize. He is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Code Blue and The Prophecy. Berlin's poetry has appeared widely in anthologies and such journals as Nimrod, JAMA, and The Lancet. His column "Poetry of the Times" has appeared for more than ten years in Psychiatric Times. He has established the Gerald Berlin Creative Writing Prize (named for his father) for medical students, nursing students, and resident physicians at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where the author is a senior affiliate of psychiatry. He has published more than sixty scientific papers and has edited Sleep Disorders in Psychiatric Practice and Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process. Most recently, he is the author of the poetry collection, SECRET WOUNDS (BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2011). He practices psychiatry in a small town in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts.

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Jennifer Fandel @ ForeWord Reviews