Cancer comprises Tom Raworth's writing from September 1970 through May 1971, and was originally to have been published by Harvey Brown's Frontier Press (based in West Newbury, Massachusetts) in 1973. When Frontier's funds ran out, the typescript was returned to its author, and the book's opening section, Logbook, was published as a stand-alone volume by Poltroon Press in 1976. In the 1980s, Raworth revised the book's other two sections, Journal and Letters (the letters he sent to Edward Dorn from the Yaddo artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York) for separate publication. Over fifty years later, Logbook, Journal and Letters are now published together, as the author intended, with the original versions of both the Journal and Letters seeing print for the very first time.