Life with Sam

Critic Reviews

As I read this book over and over again, the tears welling in my eyes answered for me: yes, here is a life and a poetry that does matter . . .Hutner’s large-hearted work joins her not only with the greatest parent-elegists of lost sons—Ben Jonson, Ralph Waldo Emerson—but also with a poetics older even than Horace . . . Reading these poems, whose rhythms pound as hotly and audibly as the emaciated boy’s heart against his mother’s ear, whose memorable rhymes are like watermarks of tears on every page, we are returned to the purest, most elemental beginning of poetry.
— Rafael Campo, Ph.D.

This book . . . is a celebration of the life of a little boy named Sam . . . The photographs . . . could not be better or more poignant. Ms. Hutner’s poetry is not only moving, but is also that of a mother in profound grief over the greatest loss any of us can experience—the loss of a child. As an expression of personal feeling and memories, this book has no peer . . .
— Eric F. Grabowski, M.D., Sc.D.Attending Pediatrician, Mass General Hospital for ChildrenAssociate Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA

When a person hears the doctor say, “You have cancer,” it is impossible to comprehend what that means. Will I live? How will this change my life? How will this affect my family? When the person is a child, it is the whole family who asks the questions: the mother, the father, the brothers and sisters, the grandparents. This book shows us how one family lived. It will be valuable for all families, whether children are sick or well, to make us remember what the family is all about.
— Anne Moore, M.D.Professor of Clinical Medicine, Hematology and Oncology, Cornell University New York Presbyterian Hospital, New York