The Magdalene Poems

“Gorgeous, ferocious, lacerating, sexy, and profoundly compassionate.”—Michael Cunningham Magdalene imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman who embodies the spiritual and sensual, alive in a contemporary landscape—hailing a cab, raising a child, listening to news on the radio. Between facing the traumas of her past and navigating daily life, the narrator of Magdalene yearns for the guidance of her spiritual teacher, a Christ figure, whose death she continues to grieve. Erotic, spirited, and searching for meaning, she is a woman striving to be the subject of her own life, fully human and alive to the sacred in the mortal world.

Love is actually a being that lives through us and many dimensions, the most ancient traveler of all. Magdalene was inhabited by it, as was her sometime teacher, sometime disciple Jesus the Christ. Together they, perhaps more than anyone else, embodied the will of love through death, incarnations and movement through the solar abyss. They left a message for us, a portal, a passageway through which we can all travel. Join them and be partly human, partly divine, taste god in all its permutations and be transformed in the luminous mystery of their experience. This is not a scientific treatise or a brief respite in the flight from body to body. It is a call of awakening into the bright memory we all share. Come, dare this lyrical blasphemy.

Until the age of twelve, Georgia Lee Kay-Stern believed she was Jewish — the story of her Cree birth family had been kept secret. Now she’s living on her own and attending first year university, and with her adoptive parents on sabbatical in Costa Rica, the old questions are back. What does it mean to be Native? How could her life have been different? As Winnipeg is threatened by the flood of the century, Georgia Lee’s brutal murder sparks a tense cultural clash. Two families wish to claim her for burial. But Georgia Lee never figured out where she belonged, and now other people have to decide for her.

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize: “Thought-provoking, poignant, brutal, amusing, and always beautiful.”—Elizabeth Berg Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders: what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time—during those apparently unmiraculous periods of everyday trouble and joy?

The poems of The Wild Rose Asylum give to the women of the Magdalen laundries a voice that sharpens the air. The testimonies rendered here are stark yet fiercely lyrical, bearing witness to generations of lost women and lost freedom.