The Bright Hour

Nina Riggs was a 38-year-old poet and mother of two young boys living in Greensboro, North Carolina, when she was diagnosed with what looked like a single small spot of breast cancer in 2015. The disease turned out to be metastatic, and Riggs wrote The Bright Hour across the year she had left, weaving the day-to-day of treatment into a wider meditation on her great-great-great grandfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, on her mother's own death from cancer, and on what it means to mother young children inside a foreshortened life. The book moves in short reflective chapters and lands somewhere between memoir and lyric essay.