Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life by Katherine E. Standefer Review by Dr. Kate Gale

Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life by Katherine E. Standefer is a book everyone should read. Kati Standefer has long QT syndrome, and her doctor decides that she needs the surgical implant of a defibrillator to keep her heart from stopping.  The surgeries, plural, are extremely painful.  But there is also the difficulty in raising the money for the surgery.  Standefer treks us through the difficulties of navigating America’s tortuous health care system.   The journey of the book is to discover where the metal in her body comes from, the metal which now runs her heart.  Standefer realizes that her life is now controlled by this foreign metal object inside her chest, and she wants to know where it comes from.  She travels to mines around the world, to Madagascar and Rwanda to see the place where the metal is dug from the earth, the place where the land is deforested, the place where life is disrupted and villages never go back to normal.  Katherine Standefer lives with the constant awareness that she can be shocked at any time, and at some point, she is shocked, but as she invites us into her life, we realize that her precarious life is a metaphor for all of our lives and the life of our planet.  Our lives on this planet are fragile.  We get into cars every day and into planes and trains, and travel at ferocious speeds; our lives are tender and fragile, in the hands of the wild.  The planet is hanging on by a thread, and Standefer invites us to examine that thread.  Fragility is the only constant.  Electricity could shock us into the next world.  Unless we take care of this world, there won’t be another.  Standefer invites us into the narrative of her heart.  What keeps you going?  What keeps us going? Where would you go to find out? 

Dr. Kate Gale is co-founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review.  She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. She is the author of the forthcoming The Loneliest Girl from the University of New Mexico Press and of seven books of poetry including The Goldilocks Zone from the University of New Mexico Press in 2014, and Echo Light from Red Mountain in 2014 and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis, which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee.  

5 January 2022