A person who receives a terminal diagnosis has limited options, most of which boil down to continuing or ceasing medical care. Such choices are knotted with considerations such as health-care access, cost, and personal belief, along with society's expectations and level of tolerance for illness and death. The Dutch poet Lieke Marsman, who died at age 35 in 2026, tackles all of this and more with exceptional frankness in On Another Planet They Can Save Me, translated by Sophie Collins.
Marsman's philosophical memoir charts her intellectual, emotional, and spiritual response to a 2017 bone cancer diagnosis. In a collection of longer essays interspersed with shorter, dated journal entries, Marsman acknowledges that she has reached a juncture where the reality of her demise has pierced her long-held beliefs about god and the universe. She investigates other writers' and thinkers' works on faith, death, and even UFO sightings while living out the dissonance of wondering whether each experience will be her last: "I'm still afraid of all the moments leading up to it, when every action is the last time that action will take place. The last visit to the supermarket. The last blood test. The last cookie... the farewell to all the possibilities here."
As her remaining time unspools, Marsman shares the comfort of realizing how little humanity knows of the universe and its phenomena--distant galaxies and the divine. The result is an authentic and beautiful meditation on the universal and yet highly individual tragedy of death that leaves a powerful, lingering ache, delivering on Marsman's wish to be "a call to life." --Kristen Coates, editor and freelance reviewer