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A poem is presented.

The [Susan Wicks]' poster marks the biggest single foster parent recruitment campaign the area has ever seen. By flooding the five regions with posters, agencies are hopeful that passers-by will soon take notice of the appeal and give thought to whether they could become a foster family.

This is from the collection Open Diagnosis, whose cover shows a \"magnetic resonance image\" of the poet's own brain. The poem closes a section which charts a progression towards the nightmare diagnosis of her own multiple sclerosis. Earlier poems spoke of her \"flora and fauna\" of body cells and chemicals in poison-terms (\"cholinesterase, multiple sclerosis, poison oak\"), and imagined blindness and disability to come, in titles like \"When I Am Blind I Shall,\" and \"A Disabled Toilet Is\". But now things are OK after all. She can re-see the future free of threat; can see the snake's head of destiny knowing it is not, after all, poisonous. The poem ends on an image of a snake's head, aka her future, shrinking to nameable proportions and displaces illness and death on to another creature dying. The poet is no longer the object of X-ray and diagnosis but an observer. She kneels, not as a victim, but to watch, see, and re-diagnose what she is seeing. I see / the head is not a head, / the slit I have seen as mouth / is not a mouth. The poem celebrates escape from danger with sun stroking / the slug's wet skin as it hangs / in the light, resting, so that even the victim / must surely feel pleasure. Death is someone else's sliding reversal of birth, a slug sucked backwards / to the belly that is not belly.

The piece stands out because [Susan Wicks]'s rhythms are generally muted and her language aspires to be affectless: after all, she is usually writing about the sublime occurring in ordinary lives. This can lead to redundancies - a steam train \"chuffing past across the hillside, / puffing out smoke / and steam\", as one might all too readily expect, for instance - and to flatness: \"all I could mange to write back / was something tasteless\". Wicks then faces the problem of whipping up her language in order to reach her epiphany. She frequently resorts to exhortation - \"look closely\"; \"think of the fraying curtains\" - and rhetorical questions: \"what do you make of that yellow?\"; \"How trite is that?\" Wicks rarely uses the \"lyric I\", even when the poem is a reverie, preferring a coercive \"we\" and a progressively over-intrusive \"you\": \"Sometimes your body yearns for an itch of stars\"; \"you have this vision of an ideal fire\"; \"one day you read a line in the local press\". Often, none of this is enough, and her invariably hefty last lines - \"you don't feel that again\"; \"the sky on fire\" - seem portentous, unearned.

There was no time for despair, however. [Susan Wick] began work at the University of Minnesota on a master's degree in personnel administration and wound up helping one of her professors run seminars on such topics as stress and time management. That was the germ of her company, which she formed in the fall of 1981 to offer seminars on child-care management. But the more she talked with day-care administrators the more she realized that the greater opportunity lay in temporary services. With little competition, however, she was on her way when the economy recovered. Today Wick has five full-time employees, more than 100 temporary workers and annual contracts with 250 day-care locations. Revenues should hit $300,000 this year, compared with $170,000 in 1986. Wick is planning to expand into other cities next year. We're not dealing with a homebody here. Wick holds a degree in child psychology, and she once owned a small nursery school. Then her business partner died in 1978. A year later her marriage came unraveled. Those two losses and a heavy debt load compelled Wick to close her business and go on welfare.

The judges say the effect of Ni Chuilleanain's impressionistic style is like watching a photograph as it develops. \"She is a truly imaginative poet, whose imagination is authoritative and transformative. She leads us into altered or emptied landscapes, such as that in The Polio Epidemic, when children were kept indoors, but the poet escapes on a bicycle: 'I sliced through miles of air/ free as a plague angel descending/ On places buses went . . .' Spring creative writing classes are getting underway at Galway Technical Institute with husband-and-wife team Kevin Higgins and Susan Millar DuMars, organisers of the Galway-based Over the Edge reading series, which showcases new writers. Classes with Higgins, for beginners in poetry, stories or memoir, take place on Mondays from 7pm to 9.30pm, starting next Monday and running for eight weeks. Classes with Millar DuMars, for those who've participated in writing classes before or begun to have work published in magazines, take place on Tuesday evenings, also for eight weeks. Places on both courses cost [euro]120. For details, telephone 091-581342, e-mail adultedinfo@cgvec.ie or see gti.ie.

I.Can Foundation, founded by cartoonist and author Ben Wicks, aims to give every child the opportunity to become literate. Wicks, who died in 2000, has been succeeded by his daughter, Cambridge resident Susan Wicks, who is part of the team continuing the work began by her father and by her mother, Doreen Wicks. Wicks credits her parents with inspiring her to get involved in what was going on in the world at a young age - especially since she wasn't sure it was what she wanted to do at the time. She was 18 or 19 years old when she decided to quit high school. She was living at home in Toronto with her parents when she decided, instead, to go to work. Dad Ben had other ideas. He had written an article about Haiti and wanted her to read it. An orphanage there was looking for volunteers and Ben decided Susan should go. She wasn't so sure. PHOTO SUBMITTED / This young girl, photographed last July, is a regular patron of one of Fortaleza's Little Libraries in Brazil. I.Can Foundation tries to create a safe, friendly environment that encourages children to become literate and discover a love of reading.; [Jacquie Rashleigh] and Susan Wicks (right).; Students at Coronation Public School held a readathon late last year and raised $850 for I.Can Foundation. Shown above left are students Mikey Mullin and Bonnie Jamieson with Rashleigh.

Barbara Ann Burke Barbara Ann Burke (nee Wick) age 65; beloved wife of Thomas, mother of Timothy (Michelle) and Carolyn (Curt) Mette, went to her eternal salvation on November 4, 2013. Barbara was born in Marshall, MN., the daughter of Edward A. and Helen A (nee Widmark) Wick. As the child of a career Air Force Officer, Barbara developed an early love of travel. Most notable, she lived in Morocco and Guam.

A deliciously Gothic thriller driven by thwarted desires, sibling rivalry and destructive secrets. Taut and slickly plotted, Hoskyns's debut displays a remarkable gift for dialogue, and being a novel about therapy - the talking cure of the title - dialogue is all. Single mother, works in provincial bookshop, fool for love (fell for a right bastard last time), seeks in turn impressionable young man to seduce and abandon. This is the key to Susan Wicks's first novel - and one of its rather arch, self-conscious jokes, too, for every chapter starts with an imaginary section of small ads from a local paper. A published poet, Wicks has a facility with words, but there is something altogether too queasy about this story of emotional manipulation.