Any Pain, Any Scarring?

Any pain, any scarring? It's a question the poet has asked his many patients over the years- and it's the question these poems finally ask of him. Here Pankaj Khemka traces a life lived in a body that was always evidence: a boy with albinism, stared at and named by strangers; a physician reading other bodies, absorbing what they carry; a man learning, late and imperfectly, how to be accompanied - by memory, by grief, by a dog named Rumi. These poems begin in embarrassment - an exam room, a third date, a name I was called - and end somewhere near grace. Any Pain, Any Scarring? is about difference, desire, vocation, and my lifelong longing to be seen accurately.