Asylum

August 1, 2020

In her fifth collection, Bialosky (The Players) presents a symphonic poem, a word quilt arranged in five parts and over 100 sections. Ricocheting themes, which return to provide different perspectives, include a sibling's suicide, the rewards and risks of family life, nature (both kind and cruel), and the Holocaust and other mass murders. The best poems utilize repetition to produce an incantatory quality: "snow that dusts/ bridges, highways, roofs,/ ...insufferable snow that falls/ on the pots that hold/ the pods of the dead." Two poems set in Russia reveal the sense of dislocation caused by travel, "furloughed from my country, no longer mother to my son,/ wife to my husband, in my dreams always the same age." The book succeeds on many levels. Strongest are the poems on suicide and its permanent but dramatic effects on the family, while prose sections on yoga work less well, pulling readers out of the poem, and several sections consist of only a single line that doesn't always move the poem forward. In the end, though, this collection becomes much more than the sum of its parts. VERDICT Precise language, deft metaphors, and emotional undertones keep audiences invested and sometimes enthralled. Recommended for most collections--Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2020
Bialosky returns to poetry after celebrating the form in Poetry Will Save Your Life (2017). This graceful, spiraling, often elegiac, always vivid book-length meditation casts shifting light on family, self, and the drama of the living world. Whatever is illuminated, so precisely, so gracefully, is also shadowed. Guided by Dante and Paul Celan, the narrator revisits her Cleveland childhood, her Iowa writing-student years (an asylum where there is no name for the ways we hoped / language would save us ), and, in waves, her sister's suicide. Trees are stalwart presences, enduring the seasons, timekeepers inhaling and exhaling. Bialosky writes of pollen, snow, wind, monarchs, of birds hiding in the sarcophagus of a bereaved tree. Her touch is light yet trenchant, her cadence entrancing, her wonder elating, her sorrows chilling. Asylum is sought and denied; personal pain is compounded by communal horrors. We enter asylum of thought / & afterthought, the inner precincts of a poet tracing the nexus between mind and body, human and nature, life and death, while sheltering the small flame of hope, so tenuous, so necessary.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)