The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes ― Poems 2005-2017

On returning north to Amsterdam from a writer's residency in the south of Holland, poet and novelist Lieke Marsman received grave news: the shoulder pain that had been bothering her for years, and that had recently become unbearable, was found to have been caused by a malignant tumour the size of a grapefruit; it was chondrosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer.

Frank, conversational and suffused with a dry humour, The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes is a record of the diagnosis and the events and thoughts that took place around it. But this is also a collection that turns its attention outwards, towards societal ills and their perpetrators, including the political class and Big Pharma. An energising mix of prose and lyric, the poems (many of which share their title with that of the collection, rendering it an at once mundane and threatening refrain) start to feel like scans themselves, offering readings of both the writer and her environment.

Beautifully translated by the poet Sophie Collins, the book also includes a translator's note in the form of a letter to her author and friend.

Lieke Marsman published her first poetry volume (Things That I Tell Myself) in 2010 when she was only twenty years old, and promptly won three poetry prizes. Her first novel (The Opposite of A Human Being), in which she intertwined poetry and prose to examine climate change and our attitudes towards it, was published in 2017.

Sophie Collins grew up in Bergen, North Holland, and now lives in Edinburgh. She is co-editor of tender, an online arts quarterly, and editor of Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016), an anthology of contemporary poetry translations. small white monkeys, a text on self-expression, self-help and shame, was published by Book Works in November 2017 as part of a commissioned residency at Glasgow Women's Library. Her debut collection of poems Who Is Mary Sue? was published by Faber & Faber in 2018.