After a Short Illness is John Whitehouse's meditation on aphasia, written from the aftermath of a stroke that almost severed his speech. The poems work in short, image-dense stanzas that measure the distance between talk and utterance, moving between hospital wards, a brother's death, and the task of giving names to animals. Whitehouse finds company among others estranged from language, Zazetsky writing his way back from a head wound and Baudelaire silenced in an asylum, and what accumulates is less lament than an account of language repossessed word by word.