Michael Walsh, _Creep Love_

 THE CONFESSIONAL MODE in American poetry is alive and well, judging from Michael Walsh's collection. He has a lot to work with--growing up queer and Catholic on a dairy farm would provide some strong material all by itself, but Walsh's biological father also had children by Walsh's mother's sister, so he has cousins who are half-siblings, and he had a physically abusive and possibly deranged stepfather as well.

It's a wonder he emerged as any kind of functioning adult, to say nothing of his developing the calm, balanced, exacting, and sometimes even humorous voice of these poems. 

The volume's main artery is memory, but fantasy runs alongside it, possible lives that did not happen ("My Mother as a Pregnant Teenage Runaway," "My Mother with Dozens of Gay Sons," "Eight Dreams on the Run with my Father"). 

Walsh avoids the temptation to sound a note of forgiveness and reconciliation, which is a little refreshing, actually. Instead, we have understanding...and relief that one understood in time to save one's own life. The distinctness of Walsh's voice is suggested by his being able to explain that self-understanding using the imagery of quantum mechanics.

The Queer as Electron

Knowing my identity
        in the family could shift
    with each observer, I watched

 

        how a turn of phrase, a silence could switch me
from brother to cousin, from momma's boy
            to daddy's bad seed, from gay

 

    to confused virgin, and back again
                in the blink of a sentence.
           Without moving, I dodged them.

 

    Inside the whirling cloud,
I formed myself in opposition
        to their background radiation.

Rachel Aviv, _Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us_

 I FINISHED THIS months ago but have been daunted by the prospect of writing about it. It's more interesting than anything I can say about it, that's certain--it bids fair to become a contemporary classic, I think.

Framed by a prologue about Aviv's own brush--at age six!--with professional mental health treatment and an epilogue about what became of a somewhat older girl whom she met while in treatment, Strangers to Ourselves offers four portraits of individuals for whom, at different times and in different places, mental health treatment became the dominant fact of their existence. 

The first, Ray, was in an institution in the 1980s, right at the time when psychoanalytical approaches were only starting to give way to pharmaceutical ones, and the doctors treating him did not want to try drugs; the fourth, Laura, in treatment in the 2010s, was medicated to a fare-thee-well from a young age and now wonders if it was too much. 

Between those two ironically complementary cases, we have a woman in India whose circumstances looked like divine madness to some of her neighbors, and a woman who, in an act like the historical Margaret Garner or Morrison's fictional Sethe, tried to drown her children to save them from what she feared was an even worse fate.

The quick summation of the book would be that there are quite a few ways to explain mental illness, none of which seems completely adequate, and navigation among the explanations is not the lightest of the burdens of being mentally ill. 

As is the case with any really good book, though, the quick summation is only the tip of the iceberg and gives no true idea of what an absorbing experience the reading of it is, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page.

You and I may never sail to the strange shores these profiles describe, but Aviv helps us see those shores are not so far away from any of us as we suppose.