{"id":2103,"date":"2010-03-01T19:59:14","date_gmt":"2010-03-02T00:59:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/product\/import-placeholder-for-188\/"},"modified":"2022-12-05T12:49:29","modified_gmt":"2022-12-05T17:49:29","slug":"wild-rose-asylum","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/product\/wild-rose-asylum\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Rose Asylum"},"content":{"rendered":"
READ A SAMPLE<\/a><\/div>\n

Winner of the 2008 Akron Poetry Prize<\/b><\/p>\n

The poems of The Wild Rose Asylum<\/i> offer a multi-faceted consideration of the historical phenomenon of Ireland\u2019s Magdalen asylums, the largest and most controversial of which were run for 150 years, until 1996, by the Catholic Church. In poems that embrace both traditional and experimental forms, Rachel Dilworth\u2019s work explores complex factors involved in the loss by thousands of Irish women of years of their lives, numerous aspects of their identities, and countless future possibilities to confinement and arduous unpaid laundry labor as \u201cpenitents\u201d in these facilities for so-called \u201cfallen\u201d women. Pervaded by a cutting awareness of an incarceration of the spirit, as well as of the beauty and naturalness of so many women\u2019s development being suppressed and denied, these poems navigate individual and collective voice and silences, the held and withheld and disappeared or ignored, with a grace and unflinching attention. Humane and wide-ranging, The Wild Rose Asylum is a researched act of witness to an issue rife with loss\u2014poems that seek to be \u201cbird enough to dive far\/into the heart of it and bring up something.<\/p>\n

Robert Penn Warren said, \u201cHistorical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.\u201d The history behind the ravishing poems in Rachel Dilworth\u2019s first book, <\/i>The Wild Rose Asylum: Poems of the Magdalen Laundries of Ireland, is almost too much to be fathomed. Eschewing the stridency of political correctness and the well-intended pity of the confessional, Dilworth reaches beyond mere reportage or sensationalism to chronicle the institutionalization of supposedly \u201cwayward\u201d women in Ireland\u2019s religious-run \u201cMagdalen asylums,\u201d and the maddening rationales of a society where women were all too often judged obedient or dangerous, servant or temptress, but ultimately expendable. The testimonies rendered here are stark yet fiercely lyrical, bearing witness to generations of lost women and their lost freedom: to Mary Norris, who sneaks to the toilet to piece together newspaper scraps she smuggles from the trash in order \u201cto hold the world close;\u201d and to young Bridget, so like the wild fuchsia, with its \u201cbloodshine petal\u201d and \u201camaranthine heart.\u201d Amazingly, even in the midst of horror, beauty endures. The crushing litany of sexual violence in \u201cOh Rose\u2014His Dark Secret Love\u201d is all the more harrowing for its insistence upon precision and eloquence, until all that remains are the roses, standing in mute witness: \u201cRed as cuts, as cheeks perspiring, \/ these blooms startle the bush that yields them.\u201d From terza rima to the \u201cBody Sonnets,\u201d ballads to transcribed inventories, the poems of <\/i>The Wild Rose Asylum give to the women of the Magdalen Laundries a voice that \u201csharpens the air.\u201d<\/i>
\n\u2014Rita Dove<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

About the author<\/h3>\n
\n

Rachel Dilworth<\/strong> received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis and her BA from Yale. Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, AGNI Online, American Literary Review, Chautauqua, Spoon River Poetry Review<\/i>, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ireland for creative writing, a Jack Straw Writers Program residency, Yale\u2019s Clapp Fellowship for poetry, scholarship support from the Bread Loaf Writers\u2019 Conference, commendation in the UK National Poetry Competition, a Dorothy Prize, and other awards.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poems of the Magdalen Laundries of Ireland<\/h4>\n

by Rachel Dilworth<\/h3>\n

Pages: 91; Size: 6″ x 9″
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