Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares Katie Condon's poem, "The Insurance Representative Tells Me How Much the Baby’s Delivery Will Cost." Condon is the author of Praying Naked, which won the Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. A former Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University and a recipient of the 2025 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Condon is an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University and lives in Dallas.

About her poem, “The Insurance Representative Tells Me How much the Baby’s Delivery will Cost,” Condon says, "Preparing to give birth was, for me, as nearly a dystopian experience as the birth itself. During my first pregnancy, I’d often wonder if the healthcare system was designed with the intention to confuse people until they stopped asking questions. How naive of me."

She also said, “This poem aims to simulate the absurd experience of advocating for care coverage only to deal over and over again with the farcically inhumane attitudes of the systems that aim to support our health.”

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 27 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is an instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.