Alan Lightman, Author of Einstein's Dreams

From Scientist to Stroke Survivor is an extraordinary testament to the

human spirit, a powerful account of life after a stroke and the redefinition

of body and mind. And, even in the face of unimaginable disability, there

is hope and some kind of spiritual redemption, as expressed in the line

 “yet endless beauty to behold this broken world.”

After a stroke at age 27, Elly Katz found herself in “The Vale of Soul-Making,” and this collection, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief , is her song from that terrain of severe diability. With a juxtaposition of imagery––mechanical and natural, quotidian and holy––the poet struggles with “how to line up facts with truth.” In this visceral, urgent collection poetic muses and ekphrasis help the speaker create self-portraits. She says she’s “a nest rigged,” and “a bird…even if I also must be its cage.” Through these heartbreaking and tenacious poems, the speaker invites us to “Take it from me, my grief, I mean––it’s for sale.” 

In From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted, Elly Katz creates a compelling, transcendent narrative of her experience as the survivor of a profound stroke. I strongly recommend this work for anyone engaged in the treatment or recovery process, whether as a medical professional, a caregiver or a patient. Elly provides unique insight into the grief and pain of her experience while at the same time holding up a beacon of hope to anyone struggling to regain anything approaching “normalcy” after major injury or illness. This work combines poetry, testimony, and self-analysis to bring the reader into the world of someone experiencing life-altering change.

As someone who has suffered a brainstem stroke and who liveswith a rare connective tissue disorder (EDS), Elly Katz has found poetry an abiding solace that beckons her to write. These are moving poems “filled with the losses my lithe legs, / wandering in abroad exhibit halls, / never walked into finding.”

Elly Katz has written a book about disability, about the loss and recovery of the physical and spiritual self, that is unlike anything I've read before.  It's a profound and lyrical meditation on what it means to be alive, a book that will shatter your heart on one page and piece it back together on the next.

Elly Katz was my student, a particularly brilliant one.  Her undergraduate career was somewhat compromised (and made extra challenging)  by the painful complications of living with a chronic connective tissue disease.  Despite setbacks and occasional crises, Elly excelled in college and was destined to join the scientific elite via the PhD program at Harvard Medical School.  But then the unthinkable happened.  In the course of a routine procedure relating to her connective tissue problems, a physician’s mistake resulted in severe nerve damage: from Oct 2022, Elly has had no feeling of or control over the right side of her body.  From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: A Life Redacted is an account of the impacts on Elly and her family of this shattering and utterly unexpected event.  It is not, however, a standard memoir of illness endured or of hope heroically regained.  Rather, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: A Life Redacted showcases Elly’s distinctive and remarkable approach to processing what has happened to her: she has chosen to explore her new, truncated world – the pain, the emotion, the loss, the love – through her writing.  A Life Redacted is catharsis, an airing of unfathomable grief; it is description, a powerful evocation of what it is to be Elly ("I feel like I free-fall onto air each time my right foot strikes ground"); it is reconciliation, from the shock of discovery to an understanding of and adjustments to new realities.  Above all, it is powerful and effective as writing: the pain is disturbingly tangible, the frustration shockingly concrete, and the candour excruciatingly soul-baring.  Elly’s words soar.  It’s as if she has managed to re-assign all her stymied corporeal energies and appetites to the language centers of her brain such that her entire being is condensed into her writing.  The result is extraordinary.  Unsparing, poignant, and ultimately reaffirming, A Life Redacted gives us extraordinarily privileged access to Elly’s world, and, in doing so, unveils a remarkable voice.

Elly Katz’s From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is a powerful look at trauma, disability, and the enduring power of the individual. This heart-wrenching and inspirational collection not only gives insight into the emotional toll of chronic disease and trauma, but what it is to be human - to more than persist, but to reconstruct after devastating loss. first met Elly when she was a student and in the process of applying to Ph.D. programs in biomedical research. She impressed me then as she still does with her strength and her thirst for knowledge, discovery, and understanding. After the trauma of her injury, I am inspired to read her transformation into poet and philosopher. I encourage anyone in the medical science community to read Elly’s work as a way to better understand the human side of the ailments we study and aim to treat.

I struggled with how to format this review. Tradition would be to focus on the book – to comment on its structure, content and overall impression. Yet, in writing it I kept drifting toward writing about Elly, the person. Why? Because Elly is her book, her story, her poetry. From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is Elly. I have known Elly now for around five years. I was introduced to her though a mutual contact after she posted a piece in the Jewish Journal. I reached out to her and we instantly developed a close friendship; we talked at least once a week. We shared a love for molecular biology and writing. Even though her EDS was a constant struggle, Elly was attending Harvard and full of a punchy zest for life. Then, after she traveled for a neck procedure, I didn’t her from her. My calls went unanswered. A week passed, and then a month. That’s when I learned of the stroke she suffered during the procedure. When we finally talked, Elly was different – her former enthusiasm had dimmed. New physical struggles were layered upon her already overbooked somatic calendar. From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted begins when Elly wakes up after the procedure and realizes something has profoundly changed. The hope of improvement was, in a moment, a cataclysmic realization of more loss. More disconnect from the physical world. What follows is Elly’s transformation; her transcendence into a new state of being. There are two takeaways from this book. First, is Elly’s writing. For most writers, myself included, stringing words together is a nervous, clunky process, like chopping at a tree with an axe and hoping it falls somewhere near the right place. Yet, for Elly, the process moves like a ballerina, gliding so effortlessly that the artistry vanishes. Here’s the thing about Elly: her writing is unforgettable. Out of a toolbox of prosaic words that we all have access to; she weaves a tapestry of gold. The second, is hope. The indominable nature of the human spirit. Anyone who has experienced pain, loss – suffering that seems pointless – will benefit from this book. Pain, in this life, can be arbitrary and instantaneous. It can come from anywhere at any time. As Elly describes it, “Just as quickly as we enter the womb of the world, we can be pushed out, evaporated out of our current mentality and woken to hollow shells of ourselves.” Yet, out of loss sometimes comes a transcendence. Beethoven wrote the 5th without auditory input. Steven Hawking uncloaked the laws of the universe without motor neurons. Sometimes, loss is amplification – a direct line of sight without dilution. Elly’s loss is testimony that pain is sometimes not pointless – it is the pollen that makes some part of us better. For Elly, the rug of desire for experience was pulled out from under her – the earth shifting every time she tried to take a step. And, yet, this did not extinguish her spirit, but added kindling to the beautiful fire that burns within her. In Elly, the youthful churning turbine of yearning became unhinged from the physical and coupled to something that would allow an output: her keyboard. Now, Elly writes for a simple reason: she has to. She writes because her soul is a percolating hotbox of raw feelings that needs to vent before it suffocates her. She writes to add edges to an amorphous future. This book is her gift to the world.

From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is an extension of Elly Katz the person. For me, the joy of reading a remarkable book is its ability to disconnect you from the world – to lose the nagging thoughts, tinging pains and existential fog for a time – an emersion into a different place. It is impossible not to become immersed in Elly’s story and her poetry. So, make a cup of coffee or tea, curl up on the couch and get to know Elly Katz. You will never forget her.

I couldn’t help feeling a weird sense of guilt as I read Elly Katz’s new book, “From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted.” Elly has spent most of her life struggling with physical pain. In a piece we published in The Journal five years ago, she wrote: “I crafted this autobiographical sketch while braced in a shoulder garment that hugs my right lower rib and shoulder, which dislocate during sleep almost nightly. A neck brace cloaks my cervical spine and offers some semblance of stability my frequent shoulder dislocations demand. My right arm, a helpless child uncertain of how to carry her own weight, tugs at the base of my scalp.”

Elly had been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), a rare heritable connective tissue disorder that lacks a cure. The piece was a triumph of the spirit, showing how Elly overcame never-ending ailments to thrive in academia at Harvard College. But however difficult those obstacles were, the story still had a familiar feel. We’ve all come across the cliché of a courageous soul overcoming disability. Oct. 24, 2022 is the day Elly’s story stopped being a cliché. An unfortunate accident in the operating room made her past condition feel like a Hawaii vacation. Forget Harvard. Forget the dream of becoming a genetic scientist. Forget all those little pleasures she managed to enjoy despite EDS.

She had gone in that day for a routine set of injections to help with the cervical instability around her neck. But this is the spine we’re talking about; the margin of error is measured in millimeters. Tragically, a slip of the needle triggered a debilitating stroke and a hemorrhage that unleashed unbearable pain and paralyzed Elly’s right side.

As a way, perhaps, to create distance from her sudden nightmare, she wrote about it in the third person:

“Suddenly, she failed to locate her entire right side. The once watertight GPS system between her brain and her body was breached. ‘Mom, is my right side on the bed? Where is my right side? Can you see it? Is it there?’ Her interrogatories gushed forth, the questions colliding with each other breathlessly as her terror mounted. Her throat constricted around syllables. Her body plan felt remapped to an uncharted terrain relative to before… It jolted her like a harrowing nightmare, a plot twist crafted in a science fiction workshop.”

It’s striking how even physical despair could not sabotage Elly’s gift with words, her ability to render trauma with such cool precision.

“She could not determine where her right side ended, and the world began. Her sense of boundary dissolved. Her spine morphed from midline into a period, a hard stop, followed by a landslide of empty space. Her sense of center was catapulted to off-kilter. It still is. She lived out of context, at a remove from reference, inside the split-screen of her body.

“Her now overwrought and confused nervous system articulated a frightening fact. She forgot the geography of her right side, the drifting continents of ribs and limbs that were once paradoxically, disconcertingly, and lullingly welded to her torso. She could see it out of the periphery of her left eye. But feeling and seeing were so detached in her now. She longed to feel her right limbs against the gurney. She missed her once impervious right outline and felt like a vessel spilling out of herself, drop by drop, to the right.

“Fear overtook her, gripping her in a chokehold, its sour taste festering on her tongue. Her mother stood beside her bearing witness, a mirror of dense horror. Despair pooled in both of their eyes. Silence enveloped them inside an igloo of trauma.”

This is where my guilt comes in.

It doesn’t come from feeling sorry for Elly’s condition, although I’m sure there is some of that. It doesn’t come from the selfish guilt of feeling grateful for not being in her shoes, although I’m sure there’s some of that, too. No, it comes from feeling guilty that her words were bringing me tremendous pleasure. Is it callous of me to read the most heart-wrenching tale of physical pain and loss and think, “This is one of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read”?

Her prose disrupted my mind, confronting me with words I had never seen come together before. “I muddle and contuse pronouns over and again throughout this narrative, as I grapple with the lack of distance between me and myself. I write through and into an experience so massive that I require techniques to capture it. Poetry, in its permutations and repetition, is the one steadfast technology I leverage for this undertaking. I am not concerned with making meaning but with coming as close as possible to it. Therefore, the source of this artwork is a hovering presence; trauma’s scale is a forest, while my ritual consists of drawing a single tree, a branch even, in lines of words that have proven to be essential lifelines. “I glue myself together by taking a step back from the ‘I,’ not to bypass it but to earn my right ultimately to occupy it again.”

Elly’s incorrigible tenacity and love of life eventually lead her to occupy her ‘I’ again, in surprising and unlikely ways.

Her book is an homage to life through poetry, to the power of the poem to transcend the limits of language. Elly chronicles her post-Oct. 24 life in acute detail, using the lens of hundreds of poems that dance and cry on the page. The poems are divided into seven movements, like one long, epic symphony of trauma and survival.

A few notes from the first movement:

“I exist more like a vapor, spreading in all directions,

or perhaps stalwartly stationary.

It is difficult,

if not impossible,

to distinguish the two.”

From the fifth movement:

“Photons—
quanta bidding me to abide, to scavenge unwatched, primal light from my incarceration within the firm bars of disabled flesh, as robust a barricade
against being as the skin of that oak.”

From the last movement:

“Thrownness—

we exist on the perimeter of ourselves,

cows grazing outskirts of fields,

neglecting the racing evergreen heart at the center.

The random, askance universe does not catch us.”

There is a section in the introduction where Elly, overcome by her body’s devastation, feels somewhat useless and disoriented, fearing she might not have anything left to give.

Her raw, luminous prose in this remarkable book should put those fears to rest. For those of us who revere words, as well as life, this book is a pleasure festival, and I can’t help telling her that.