Is there a more feared sentence in the modern world than “You have Stage 4 cancer”?
For close to three years, writer Luke Icarus Simon underwent multiple chemotherapy treatments for Stage 4 Non Hodgkin’s Lymphoma only to be advised to get his affairs in order. His GP advised him to do “whatever it is you want to do as there won’t be another chance”.
Simon took off to Paris for the first time and returned to find his last chemotherapy combination treatment had finally been effective.
For poet, playwright, screenwriter and actor Luke Icarus Simon, the experience propelled him to pen a collection of poems that express the rollercoaster of anger, grief, resignation and nostalgia for what was and what might have been.
Often raw and always poignant, his book The Transit of Cancer uses a poet’s sensibility to make sense of a life half lived, one threatened with mortality before its time.
Following the publication of his poetry collection, Icarus Simon also released a new collection of moving, funny and intensely personal stories that tell of life as an immigrant child and the struggle for identity and belonging, Lost in the Last Divided Capital (Palmer Higgs, 2014).
Both books use the poet’s heart and soul to forge a path through pain and adversity, the quest for manhood, for love and for meaning in the face of mortality.
The books are available online through dennisjones.com.au, Booktopia, Book Depository and Amazon, or can be downloaded as e-books via Amazon and Kindle.