Asylum

by Caroline Cottom

Asylum is grounded in West Tennessee in the 1920s and 1930s and stretching into the present, following the author's mother, a sharecropper's daughter, and the choices she made into adulthood. The collection is an act of witness: poems of family and emotion, childhood abuse and the work of recovery.

The layered meanings of "asylum" are at work here: asylum as refuge, asylum as institution where the mentally ill and socially inconvenient were housed, asylum as legal protection. The poems are rooted in the particular soil of a particular region, among the sharecroppers and small farmers whose lives were shaped by the land they worked that was not their own.

The presence of childhood abuse is handled with the care and precision that poetry uniquely allows--approaching the unspeakable indirectly, through image and rhythm and white space. The poems say, "You are not alone. What happened to you was real. Recovery is possible. The story does not end with the wound."

The book is available from the poet and from Main Street Rag Publishing Company.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published March 30, 2022

About the author

I am a book author, poet, and spiritual and writing teacher living in Greensboro, NC, USA. I have published three books, all with themes of spirituality, assisting readers to "wake up to who you truly are."

(1) In The Isle of Is: A Guide to Awakening , co-authored with Thom Cronkhite, the reader is the main character in the story of their own spiritual awakening. All of nature comes alive to guide the reader to stories of universal wisdom. Conscious Caterpillar, Buda Bug, and a chorus of waves, among others, speak up to set things straight. Thom and I were living on a remote island in Fiji when we wrote this book!

(2) Love Changes Things: Even in the World of Politics , recounts my experience leading the US coalition of 75 national organizations that helped bring an end to nuclear test explosions in Nevada. Led by Spirit, God, or my higher self, I was guided to take unconditional love into the halls of Congress, in meetings with Soviet leaders, and addressing the United Nations, with the goal of reversing the nuclear arms race. I think you will be amazed to see how an ordinary citizen like me could make a difference. The results were profound.

(3) My poetry collection, Asylum (Main Street Rag, 2022), follows the poet's family from sharecropping on the Mississippi flood plain to Texas and California as they work to heal the impacts of multi-generational abuse. The book weaves personal and family history with the larger motif of the asylum both as a physical institution and as a metaphor for the hidden wounds carried across generations. Reviews have called the book beautiful, powerful, and redemptive.

Reviews

[Caroline Cottom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Asylum follows Virginia Long from the sharecropper's community of Mooring to Memphis, Tennessee, where she meets the man she will marry and who will father her two daughters. Woven through the book are segments of the father's obituary as written by the elder daughter. "May 21, 1986. Truman Willard Cottom died, after a long illness, trailing the perfume of a hundred women, including his two daughters." Poet Veronica Golos writes: " Asylum evokes a family's veiled history, shaken into finely etched poems of restraint and elegance....Here is depth: of emotion, family, and landscape....Here is beauty."

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This lovely collection of poems travels the country of abuse and madness and finally healing. It reminds us that pain can be overcome….but not without the journey.

[Thomas A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very clear and penetrating poetry recalling Caroline's and her family's personal stories of abuse and redemption. Recommended for anyone who has had troubling life experiences, to see a way to a place of peace and clarity.