The Wild Rose Asylum

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.

A big, opulent, full-bodied novel of love and war centering on John Hunt Morgan, the Confederate cavalry general whose fearless Raiders nearly turned the tide of the Civil War. Maps.

p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; line-height: 120%; } With this book, i present the stifled, faded, falsified, buried and condemned-to-annihilation wild-rose message of universal value as the message of national marginalization of Elizabeth Adam (1947-2014) — in her original name Erzsébet ÁDÁM — become widely known as a dramatic artist in Marosvásárhely, Romania, and an English-language reciter of Hungarian and Romanian poets in her tours in Britain and overseas.

These are vivid, visceral poems about coming of age in a place 'where the Ferris Wheel / was the tallest thing in the valley, ' where a boy would learn 'to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken's neck / with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.' . . . In spite of such hardscrabble cruelties"or because of them"there is also a real tenderness in these poems, the revelations of bliss driving along an empty highway 'like opening a heavy book, / letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower.' . . . The poet has a gift for rendering his world in cinematic images. . . . In short, these poems are the stuff of life itself, ugly and beautiful, wherever or whenever we happen to live it. "Martin Espada