Short Poems from the Insane Asylum By: Daniel Adams Daniel Adams writes poetry to raise awareness of mental health. Today, Adams is in a healthier place and spends his free time with family and friends, although he continues to suffer with depression and anxiety. His motivation for writing this book is to advocate for the mental health community by expressing to diagnosed individuals that they are not alone.

Poetry anthology from Martha H. Nasch.

This book-length sequence by the critically acclaimed poet is a seeker's story, revealing personal and historical traumas and how we search for understanding and meaning in their wake. In Asylum, poet Jill Bialosky embarks on a Virgilian journey, building a narrative sequence from 103 elegant poems and prose sections that cohere in their intensity and their need to explore darkness and sustenance both. Taken together, these piercing pieces--about her nascent calling as a writer; her sister's suicide and its still unfolding aftermath; the horror unleashed by World War II; the life cycle of the monarch butterfly; and the woods where she seeks asylum--form a moving story, powerfully braiding despair, survival, and hope. Bialosky considers the oppositions that govern us: our reason and unreason, our need to preserve and destruct. "What are words when they meet the action of what they attempt to modify?" she asks, exploring the possible salve of language in the face of pain and grief. What Asylum delivers is a form of hard-won grace and an awareness of the cost of extreme violence, inexplicable loss, and the miraculous cycles of life, in work that carries Bialosky's art to a new level of urgency and achievement.

The remarkable Poems for the Asylum was written over several months while poet Daniel J. Lutz was in and out of various mental health facilities while being treated for various illnesses and emotional breakdowns of perhaps some of the toughest moments of his life. Like reading a journal, the poems within this book are contemplations that approach difficult emotional subjects from the loss of romantic love to grief and personal struggle. The poems record the experience of humanness and desperate striving to obtain understanding of one's self through the difficult stages of healing. From suicidal to endeavoring to succeed, all aspects of the journey are recorded without apprehension. These writings are rich with emotion, thought and intelligence put in language that simplifies distress and honors that pain can be beautiful. Daniel J. Lutz's stunning Poems for the Asylum is a journey through the mind and heart of a person who is willing to show how far the spirit can stretch and though it may falter, it does not have to break.

Poetry anthology by Martha Nasch, annotated and arranged by Janelle Molony.