In the autumn of 2007, I was up late reading The Best American Essays 2006. By habit, I had been flipping through the volume’s pages, skimming opening paragraphs and bits of dialogue—you know, looking for something enticing. That’s how I encountered Marjorie Williams’ “A Matter of Life and Death.” After an unsettling account of the symptoms she and her doctors reasonably, and wrongly, attributed to benign causes, the moment comes when she’s told she has liver cancer, already at stage 4. I quickly turned to the author bios and found what I feared: Williams had succumbed before she completed the essay. A writer in her prime dead at 47, leaving behind two children, 5 and 8.

I sat there alone in the quiet and dark of my home, save for a single light shining on the vital words of a dead woman and her last passionate attempt to make her life matter. Though her fate spoke to our shared vulnerability to whatever comes for us in the end, Williams had made me feel compassion and kinship and comfort. A writer had departed the world we shared, unknown to one another, and had turned back from the darkness to hand me the gifts of feeling her loss and witnessing her steadfast courage on the precipice of the void.

So, too, these 13 poets come bearing, along with their pain, gifts wrapped in language shocking or eloquent or ironic—all exquisitely imaginative. A brother conjures the thoughts of his dying sister; a mother mourns the death—by his own hand—of a youthful son, even as her psyche works to keep him alive; a woman shares her nightmarish feelings post-mastectomy. Others here cope with debilitating pain and bewildering disorientation from maladies and their remedies. My hope is that you will be consoled by their affirmation of human dignity and beauty. Listen carefully to these voices, and you will be reassured of your worth in the continuous cycle of living and dying, and at the same time fulfill your critical role as reader. In each moment we find connection, we are reminded that it is our caring about one another—and taking good care of one another—that brings to our inevitable, painful losses a transcendence shining brightly against the dark.

Steve Granzyk is the poetry editor of Please See Me.