Asylum

by Caroline Cottom

A collection of poems about West Tennessee in the 1920s and 1930s and into the present, following the author's mother, a sharecropper's daughter, and the choices she made after leaving Mooring, Tennessee. These are poems of family and emotion, childhood sexual abuse and recovery. The book is available from the publisher, Main Street Rag Publishing Company.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published March 30, 2022

About the author

I am a book author, poet, and spiritual teacher living in Greensboro, NC, USA. My collection of poems titled Asylum was just released by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Reviews call the book beautiful, powerful, and redemptive.

My book, Love Changes Things: Even in the World of Politics , published in 2012, was followed by a book tour in California, Virginia, and Tennessee, USA. It is based on my experience of taking unconditional love into the halls of Congress, the Soviet Union, and the United Nations, with the goal of reversing the nuclear arms race, with profound results.

My husband Thom Cronkhite and I teach meditation and courses in living a spiritual life in Mexico and the U.S. We co-authored The Isle of Is: A Guide to Awakening , in which the reader is the main character in the story of their own awakening. We were living on a remote island in Fiji when we wrote this book!

I love cats, foxes, birds, and all of nature. And, of course, my family, friends, and fellow/sister meditators and everyone working for peace on the planet.

Reviews

[Caroline Cottom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Asylum is a collection of poems, many of which are set in West Tennessee on the Mississippi flood plain. The poems follow Virginia Long from the sharecropper's community of Mooring to Memphis, 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. Here is the first: "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.