Flying Wounded

Susan McCaslin's seventh book of poetry is a daring exploration of thedisturbance wreaked on a daughter by her mother's ill-treated, then untreated, mental illness and of the daughter's almost miraculous transformation. In her preface, McCaslin makes the point that, because the sixties was a time of drug-prescribed treatment for the mentally ill, her mother was probably one of legions of "hysterical women" used as guinea pigs. "Surrounded by falling stars and pieces of broken heart, Flying Wounded flies straight into the eye of madness. The book is a striking portrait of the ignorance of earlier times, and of a mother/daughter relationship that is part nightmare, part legacy. In language sometimes lyrical, sometimes straightforward as a shriek, Susan McCaslin writes about the tangled darkness of mental illness with great courage and resolve."—Barry Dempster, author of Fire and Brimstone