LOS ANGELES (AP) — Max Ritvo, a poet who chronicled his long battle with cancer in works that were both humorous and searing, has died. Ritvo was diagnosed at 16 with Ewing's sarcoma, a rare cancer that affects bones and soft tissue in children and young adults. A June poem in The New Yorker discussed an experiment where cells from his tumors were used in cancer drug treatment experiments with mice. First they were Max 1, Max 2, but now they're all just Max. [...] when you laugh at something horrible, you're just illuminating a different side of it that was already there and it's not a deflection, it makes it deeper and makes it realer, he said last month in the WNYC Studios podcast Only Human.