All That Could Be Lost
Melanie Jansen
Publication date
ISBN:
February
2026
978-1-923248-20-5
About the author
DR MELANIE JANSEN grew up in Logan City, and currently lives, writes, and practises medicine on Turrbal and Jagera land in Meanjin Brisbane. She is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Queensland and practises clinical ethics on the lands of the Yugambeh Language Speaking Nation, which spans from the Logan to the Tweed Rivers. She has a Churchill Fellowship in clinical ethics and medical humanities. Her heritage is a rich tapestry of cultures, from Dutch Malaysia, Singapore and French Vietnam to Quebec, Ireland, Scotland, England, and Italy.
Melanie has had poems published in medical journals and poetry anthologies. Her poem “Love Alone” received a commendation in the Hippocrates Poetry in Medicine Prize. “Some Days the Air is Soft” won one of the major prizes in the Grieve Competition.
All That Could Be Lost is her first poetry collection.
About the book
Imagine a child is fighting for life in intensive care. Imagine that you need to decide how--and sometimes whether--to treat that child. Imagine how it feels to tell the parents the crisis is over. Imagine how it feels to tell them the child has died.
Dr Melanie Jansen is a paediatric intensive care specialist and a medical ethicist. Many of the poems in her book record her efforts to make sense of her challenging but profoundly rewarding work, telling stories of the miraculous, of heart-breaking tragedy, and of moments of hope and wonder in the middle of crisis; and they probe, through these experiences, profound philosophical questions.
But there is also a life to be lived beyond the hospital. All That Could Be Lost examines this life, too, with honesty, intelligence and rigour, reaching into into the depths of her personal pain and loss, tracing how the close company she keeps with the crises and griefs of others affects her own experiences of grief; and celebrating, with an unabashed joy, the experience of found love, and of motherhood.
This is courageous poetry, which takes us from the frontlines of intensive care, where a physician tries to save the lives of children, to the frontlines of the heart at its grief and joy. Melanie Jansen writes exquisite lyrics of place and self and compelling free-verse portraits of her daily work in intensive care. “Why does she wear sorrow like a summer scarf?” the poet asks. The reader will share the sorrow and the scarf, the toll of this work and the delight of the spirit that sings, notwithstanding: “Twinkle,
twinkle shattered stars.”
—OWEN LEWIS, MD
Professor of Psychiatry in Medical Humanities & Ethics,
Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons
Jansen’s poems, woven through with the tenderness of a mother, lead us safely inside the private griefs of a paediatric intensive care specialist. Take this journey with her. The emotional gravity of her writing will pull you into dark places and simultaneously lift you out of them. Her singular, beautiful words provide solace, illumination and hope.
—DR FIONA REILLY
Emergency physician, writer,and director
of the Australian Centre for Narrative Medicine