"[A] powerful [meditation] on being a husband, a father, and a human while dealing with the very real possibility that it could all come to an end."
— Katie Couric Media
"Deeply personal and touching. . . . A testament to resilience during ongoing trauma, these poems carve out snippets of wonder and remembrance to eulogize twin disasters. This collection reminds us that there are moments in any given day, even the bad ones, that are worth remembering."
— The Fiddlehead
"O’Brien explains that his obligation as a writer is 'To tell others the truth, as skillfully as possible. To make art out of pain. To heal.' Our Cancers tells his truth not only skillfully but masterfully, making from pain a lasting chronicle of art that traces fragmentary moments of healing over time."
— North American Review
"The title of this new volume of poems by playwright Dan O’Brien is heartbreaking. Our Cancers is an account of the illnesses suffered by both by O’Brien, and his wife, Jessica. In an especially harrowing twist of fate, O’Brien discovers he has colon cancer on the very day his wife receives her final treatment of chemotherapy. . . . The reader is called to witness, to hold the sorrow, to understand. . . . We might wince, look away, or we might gaze and offer a hand. I think that is O’Brien’s message for his readers: anyone one of us can be so afflicted at any time in our lives. Our Cancers then becomes universal, a quiet warning. "
— The Key Reporter
"Our Cancers is an excellent example of Shelley’s secret alchemy, which turns 'to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life.' . . . [O'Brien's] skillful enjambments give a hypnotic effect to the stream of poems; lacking titles and punctuation, they lull the reader into a trance-like state which alone, perhaps, makes their content bearable. . . . Writing the truth, he says, 'saved him.' And it has produced an exquisite and terrible beauty in these pages."
— Times Literary Supplement
"Like all those who write about their own illness and suffering, O’Brien offers up the deepest recesses of his pain for the rest of us to pick over and examine. These are sparse and beautiful poems to live by."
— Magma Poetry
"O’Brien’s books are raised far above the run of subjective accounts of recovery."
— Wild Court
"Twenty years after the events of 9/11, the dust continues to settle—in the Battery Park apartment and surrounding neighborhoods where Dan O’Brien and his wife lived and worked, in their breath and bodies, and in the brief 24 hours in which the one cancer journey concludes only to find another lying in wait. Love and nothingness curl around the enjambments and white space of these 101 terse lyric poems, each of which finds O’Brien acknowledging in new ways that 'I must find / my way / to live here.'”
— Sugar House Review