$16.00 / ISBN: 978-1-936628-65-0
Publication Date: March 31, 2021
Purchase: Accents Publishing
Cover art by Shari Weschler *Sumo Bunni
About the Book:
Not that long ago in our history, women were labeled as “other” and committed to asylums to cure them of perceived difference, and to keep them silent. This book springs from historical research into the lives of women labeled as “other”—whether that be witch, insane, or hysterical. These are the women who give us urban myths, ghost stories, and all- too-true horror stories of women locked up and abused in asylums. The poet’s experimental use of patient records, coupled with her roots in the Southern Gothic, illuminate untold stories that see-saw between realism and the fantastic.
Advance Praise:
Tina Parker’s haunting new collection Lock Her Up is a tribute, a beautifully rendered defense of women who throughout the late 1800’s and mid-1900’s were admitted into the Southwestern Lunatic Asylum in Virginia. It is an examination of the platitudes, misdiagnosis and treatments administered to women who needed succor not restraint, understanding not punishment; women who had been set aside by their families or bored husbands, were abused, widowed or their children dead or taken from them. This poet has done her research. The day they came for me/ I cartwheeled into the sea/ And sang open the snow. Reader, you will wince, you will curse, you will weep.
— Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate, author of A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen
