Asylum

"This book-length poem by the critically acclaimed poet is a seeker's story, revealing personal and historical traumas and how we search for understanding and meaning in their wake. In Asylum, poet Jill Bialosky embarks on a Virgilian journey, building a narrative from 103 elegant short poems and prose sections that cohere in their intensity and their need to explore darkness and sustenance both. Taken together, these piercing understated pieces--about her nascent calling as a writer; her sister's suicide and its still unfolding aftermath; the horror unleashed by World War II; the life cycle of the Monarch butterfly, and of the woods where she seeks asylum--form a moving sequence, powerfully braiding despair, survival, and hope, as Bialosky considers the oppositions that govern us: our reason and unreason, our need to both preserve and destruct. "What are words when they meet the action of what they attempt to modify?" she asks, exploring the possible salve of language in the face of pain and grief. What Asylum delivers is a form of hard-won grace, a coming to terms with grief and the cycles of life, in work that carries Bialosky's art to a new level of urgency and achievement"--