Wonderland Book Club (virtual)

ASYLUM by Caroline Cottom

$14.00

SKU: 9781599489186

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Asylum evokes a family’s veiled history, shaken into finely etched poems of restraint and elegance. Poetic devises, including short imaginative Obits of the poet’s father, form connective tissue. The book is perfectly arced, the poems linked and speaking to each other. Here is depth: of emotion, family, and landscape. “My ghosts are slender reeds, / my family’s bodies sinewy / from hoeing and picking / —cotton bits caught / on stubbled stalks.” Here is beauty. ~Veronica Golos, author of Girl

In this trenchant and deftly crafted collection, Caroline Cottom plays psychopomp to the shattered denizens of the asylum, only to realize that she has her own repressed narrative of sexual abuse to unravel. One stands to learn much from Cottom’s testimony that manages to marry the narrow path of poetry with a psychologically adept portrait of the survivor. Asylum serves the turn of truth and transcendence equally, and we are lucky to have it. ~Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium

These poems flow like the grounding Mississippi River, which runs through this collection of always beautiful, sometimes painful, poems. The poet travels the depths of family trauma— seeds sowed in the rural South—to the rapids of mental illness, to the sweetness of pie. The lyricism of the words and rhythmic variations flow with the poet’s memories and moods. Moving, with a spark of humor, this book gives hope through the darkness. ~Rebecca Reviere, Ph.D., Sociologist, Howard University

Caroline Cottom, Ph.D., was born in Tennessee. She is the granddaughter of sharecroppers; her mother grew up chopping cotton. She is a former faculty member at Vanderbilt University and Watkins School of Art&Design and now teaches writing in community settings and online. Her poetry appears in numerous journals and anthologies. As a nuclear disarmament activist, she led the coalition that helped end nuclear explosions in Nevada, recounted in Love Changes Things, Even in the World of Politics. Caroline and husband Thom, co-authors of The Isle of Is: A Guide to Awakening, have lived in Fiji, Ecuador, and Mexico.