A life's work of writing compelled by inner and outer forces,"Disturbing Comforter" takes the reader through a framework of vision, joy, anguish, and revelation. Janet Manuel uses luminous language to uncover the discomforting and sometimes painful nature of the Other's intersection with a frail human being, while in other pieces she simply observes the complicated society in which she must function. The random ordering of the poems speaks to the wholeness that life brings, in a pattern visible from the observer's viewpoint. Janet Manuel lives and writes in a small community an hour outside Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is a transplanted city dweller who has recently embraced country life. Born into an immigrant British military family in Northern Alberta, just before the launch of Sputnik and the dawn of the Space Age, Janet feels herself to be "born out of time," but she is grateful for the various forms of modern technology which allow the writer's craft to be so much simpler than it was in the recent past. Working in the health data analysis field from a home-based office, she is, as stated in the poem "Ordinary," a plain woman with a remarkable message. Her husband, two greyhounds, two cats, and a young draft horse share her life.