A Poem: Anorexia

Abstract

The author has played multiple roles while engaged in her qualitative works on anorexia nervosa, including observer of family treatment, nurse, researcher, and friend. Perhaps most important, however, she brings to her work the perspective of a woman with cross-disciplinary training (e.g., nursing, women’s studies, social work, and qualitative inquiry). This background led her to thinking about how anorexia nervosa might be rep-resented by poetry. She wrote the poem “Anorexia” to expand on the traditional view of this condition—a view based entirely in pathology and empirical research—hoping to look at it instead through a literary lens.