The Autistic Alice
Published on 23. March 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
72 pages
978-1-78037-343-0 (ISBN)
Description
There are two acts of recovery in this book - one of a lost brother, and another of a lost self. Joanne Limburg commemorates both in her third collection, The Autistic Alice. In its title-sequence she uses Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to explore her own experiences as a girl and young woman. Growing up with undiagnosed Asperger's, she often identified with Alice, a logical and curious child adrift in an arbitrary world. Collaging lines and phrases drawn from the two Alice books, she creates a disturbingly effective language to express the nature, discomfort and alienation of autistic experiences. In her neurodiverse verse, a text can become a rabbit-hole to another world, or a mirror. The poems that make up the book's opening sequence, The Oxygen Man, originally published as a pamphlet, were written in response to the death of Limburg's younger brother, a brilliant chemist who took his own life in 2008. They follow her as she visits the mid-Western town where he lived, worked and died; range back over their shared childhood; and look ahead as she tries to work out what it means to be the one who stays behind.
Reviews / Votes
'Joanne Limburg's The Oxygen Man is an honest, difficult lurch through the aftermath of the suicide of her brother... This pamphlet expresses a "life goes on" sensibility alongside a grappling with true grief.' - Rachael Allen, Poetry London; 'Limburg's universe appears to be constantly twisting away from perception even as she pins it down in lines of singular economy.' - Poetry Book Society BulletinMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 5 mm
Weight
106 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78037-343-0 (9781780373430)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Joanne Limburg was born in London in 1970, and studied Philosophy at Cambridge. She has since gained an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies, worked as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University, and was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Magdalen College, Cambridge, from 2008 to 2010. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1998, and her first book, Femenismo (Bloodaxe Books, 2000), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second collection, Paraphernalia (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her third, The Autistic Alice, was published by Bloodaxe in 2017. Her other books include The Woman Who Thought Too Much (Atlantic Books, 2010), a memoir about OCD, anxiety and poetry; Bookside Down: poems for the modern, discerning cyber-kid (Salt Publishing, 2013), an anthology for younger readers; and one novel, A Want of Kindness: a novel of Queen Anne (Atlantic Books, 2015).
Content
The Oxygen Man 10 Sister 11 Brother 12 Chaim 13 Welcome to the United States 14 From the Best Western 15 Your Lawn 16 Sylar and Elle 18 Double Act 19 Night Flight 21 Notes to an Unwritten Eulogy 23 Oxygen Man 24 Blue-eyed Boy 25 The Door 26 Proverbs 6:5-11 27 Not 28 On Holiday with Cotard 29 An Offering 30 The Young Dead Poets The Autistic Alice 32 Alice's Un-Birthday 33 Alice in Check 34 Alice in Reception Class 35 Big Alice 36 Alice's Walk 37 In the Garden of Live Flowers 38 Nothing but a Pack of Cards 39 Alice Between 40 Alice's Face 41 Advice for Alice 42 Tiny Alice 43 Alice's Brother 44 Alice's It 46 The Mad Hatter's Tea Party 48 Alice's Laws of Interaction 49 The Alice Case 51 Alice's Antism 52 Alice and the Red Queen 54 Alice's Checklist 55 Queen Alice 56 The Annotated Alice Other Poems 58 The Bus Riders' Creed 59 You're Not My Dad, John Inman 60 Hospital Psalm 61 Mammogram 62 Kaddish for Amy 63 The Loft Day 64 Swifts 65 A Run Round All Souls 66 Pretend to be Celia Johnson 67 Your Words 69 The View from Crieff 70 Dem Bones