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Mark Smith-Soto’s chapbook, “Waitingroom,” (Red Mountain Review: Birmingham, Ala.; 20 pages, $6 paper) calmly chronicles a brush with cancer. The tone is conversational from diagnosis to recovery, layering the anxiety.

Walking around with cancer makes you ask yourself questions. You come up with your own answers or decide there aren’t any.

The opening poem, one of the strongest of the nineteen assembled here, seems to ask, with grace and aplomb, OK, how do I handle this? It’s titled “Putting Cancer in a Poem”:

You have to be careful how you do it –
The first line for sure’s no place, even
The second or third might let it spring
Leaks and streak everything beneath. No,
First you need to let the light flap in
From the uncurtained window, catch
The deep breath off the gardenia bloom
Doing the backstroke in its brandy snifter
As the doctor on the phone says what he
Has to say, and your wife and friend wait
With wine glasses and the porch fan on,
Chatting and looking for you to come back
With the hors d’oeuvres, the Vinho Verde,
The poem of your life with its new name.

The poem answers that you have to stay in control to avoid the “leaks,” suggestive of tears and self-pity that can “streak everything.” You need to be reasonable, “let the light flap in” even though like the “gardenia bloom,” you’re fragile, “doing the backstroke,” and can’t see where you’re going.

The poem also moves in marvelously subtle ways. It pulls you in at the opening with its “first line” then “second or third,” leading you. It moves from the interior of the house to the porch, from the interiority of the narrator to a social setting. The narrator’s wife and a friend wait, chatting, expecting him. That expectation, it seems to me, echoes softly in the last line with “life with its new name,” a rebirth. The tone now becomes almost festive. That’s quite a feat after a cancer diagnosis.

Mark Smith-Soto teaches at UNCG, where he directs the Center for Creative Writing in the Arts, and edits the “International Poetry Review.” Smith-Soto’s poems have been published widely. They’ve appeared in such places as the “Antioch Review,” “Kenyon Review,” “Literary Review,” and “Nimrod.” He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing in 2005.

Another of the chapbook’s strong poems is “Waiting Room”:

I can’t make out the words. But there’s no need.
Fear and surprise make meaning parsable,
Pulse it clearly through the plasterboard, a code
That stutters almost into sense, only to fall
Into a murmur so low it feels it comes
From my own chest. We sit and wait
To enter one by one the appointed room
Where the humane doctor will explain
What being human means for us today,
Trying not to care too much while caring
For others caught in the same trap, our refrains
Of loss well known, gamely grin-and-bearing
The common wound there is no way to stanch.
Ten minutes more? Of course, I understand.

This poem turns your expectations for it upside down in the final line. “Of course, I understand.”

But you don’t. Nobody does.