Cancer moved me from the physician’s side of the examination room to the patient’s. And Still: Arriving speaks truthfully from that crossing. Dennis Freire writes with the insight of one who understands what illness takes, and with a poet’s eye for what remains: family, friendship, memory, beauty, and hope. This is not a book about dying. It is a wise and deeply human book about living.

—Bennion D. “Ben” Buchanan, MD, MBA, FACEP, Retired Emergency Physician and Medical Director

This compilation does what excellent verse should. It makes ordinary moments special. The most difficult experiences are tenderly, truthfully processed. The work is a remarkable portrait of one man’s life, framed by nature, family, acceptance, and healing. 

—Melanie Johnson, MS, Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Leavitt Group

Dennis has the hard-earned wisdom of someone who has looked squarely at life’s fragility and, rather than turning away, has chosen to look more closely. His writing explores mortality and the challenges of living with cancer and childhood abuse, but reaches far beyond trauma—to ancestry, faith, nature, memory, and the search for meaning. I found his words deeply resonant: thoughtful, vulnerable, and ultimately life-affirming.

—David Kenley, PhD, Professor and Chair, Department of Arts & Humanities, Dakota State University; Scholar of Chinese History and Author

Turning the pages of And Still: Arriving, I see the hospital doors in the title poem, opening year after year, “glad, /as if the world, still, /wants to let me in.” Through his poetry, Dennis Freire invites us into spaces he’s reclaimed from cancer where he transforms “the ordinary, unglamorous business” of being human with grace and wisdom. He finds solace in the wild honesty of the natural world: “I rise. /Not healed. Not heroic./ Just risen, the way any living thing/ rises into what light is available.”  Startled by the unexpected beauty, the “wanting” of a heart-shaped stone, he nonetheless feels satisfied, accepting nature’s imperative to simply be. Yet, he also enacts the human imperative to love, his heart opening wider as his writing lengthens into prose. In the piece “Daily Tenderness,” he recalls his brother caring for their mother as she dies. “Every Flower Leans Toward You” and “There Were Always Five of You” affirm the enduring love of his eldest daughter who lived one day yet holds four younger sisters in an eternal embrace. He shares poignant portraits of family and friends who’ve helped him survive. And not just with cancer. Freire confides abuse he suffered as a child, weaving honesty and respect for readers in his expert telling. Although stories often invite escape, the short fiction that concludes the book represents not just the expansive talents of Freire as an author; they testify to the rich, storied life of a man who has the courage and faith to live deeply, still learning every moment—and enriching our lives as he does. “Beneath all reasoning, God says/ what I keep mislaying:/ Listen. Look. / This moment is not empty.” Reading his book, we are all still arriving.

—Susan J. Sample, PhD, MFA, Associate Professor Emerita of Internal Medicine, University of Utah School of Medicine; Writer-in-Residence, Huntsman Cancer Institute; Author, Trapped in the Bone-House, 2025 Utah Book Award Finalist in Poetry, and Voices of Teenage Transplant Survivors:  Miracle-Like.