In Norway only:

An Elastic State of Mind:
D.L.D.'s Autobiography in Poems

Bilingual edition available now in bookstores, or order through Wigestrand forlag. Translations by Eirik Lodén.

Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-1887) was a professional writer, a teacher and an amateur naturalist. During the Civil War, she was appointed to the highest public office ever held by a woman in the United States. But the work she wanted to be remembered for was her work on behalf of the indigent mentally ill.

 D.L.D., as she called herself, perfected the American oratory literary genre in her documentation of the conditions of the prisons and asylums in the United States and abroad. For more than 30 years she was monomaniacal in her efforts to establish government-funded hospitals and to improve the treatment of those suffering from mental illness.

D.L.D. never married. She earned her living by teaching and later lived off the royalties of her books. She traveled alone throughout the United States, and as far as Norway and Turkey, to confer with doctors and politicians. She even enjoyed an audience with the Pope Pius IX in Rome. 

While she was a beloved antebellum celebrity, she was anything but a proto-feminist. Often misunderstood and misinterpreted by historians, D.L.D.’s public activities were not evidence of a rejection of the Victorian patriarchy, nor were they evidence of hypocrisy. D.L.D. cultivated her aura of femininity with great care, but she was a woman behind her own times, a role-model for a waning era. She was the perfect example of the Victorian “spinster” as the community’s ideal matriarch.

Extraordinarily devout and disciplined, D.L.D. was also damaged. Her childhood was marked by a volatile, abusive alcoholic father and a mother whom some described as mentally ill, and others described as drug-addicted. D.L.D. claimed she "never knew childhood". Time and again she referred to herself as an orphan.

And she obsessed over the fragile hold she had on her own sanity.

The imaginative autobiography in poems formed the basis of Ren Powell's PhD thesis at Lancaster University. Powell's meticulous research was drawn from published and unpublished documents by historians and psychologists, as well as D.L.D.'s own letters, memorials and books. The poetry collection utilizes free verse, found poems and traditional verse forms such as the villanelle, sonnet, sestina and the English madsong. It also explores the expression of bipolar disorder through poetry.

 NOW AVAILABLE via Phoenicia Publishing or Amazon.com.

 Mercy Island: New and Selected Poems by Ren Powell

Preview.

"Ren Powell takes the world in whole, ‘negotiates a new language,’ and gives it back to us in all its terror, strangeness, pain and beauty. Many of these poems read like fable: a woman with a gown of eggshells, a stone turtle that captures the essence of a childhood. Other poems testify to the resilience of the human spirit even after the unspeakable happens. I loved these poems for the freshness of the language, for their deep truths and most of all for their compassion."

     Patricia Fargnoli, author of six collections of poetry, winner of the ForeWord Magazine Silver Poetry Book of the Year Award, and Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, 2006-2009
 

"The narrator in this fine collection is explorer and cartographer of a multitude of emotional, spiritual and international landscapes. Whether ruthlessly illuminating even the darkest corners in the rooms of herself, or putting on the lives of other women like so many beautiful garments, with tenderness and respect, Ren Powell's narrator holds our attention and enriches our thinking."
     Nic Sebastian, poet and blogger, reviews Mercy Island for Goodreads.

"... And sexy. These poems are sexy. And if I say dangerous, too, you'll get the wrong idea. It's not the danger and sex we're used to from action heroes or rock stars. It's something like the edge of the world...Ren's poems are... showing me things I may not know how to talk about."
      Carolee D. Sherwood, poet and blogger

PREVIOUS COLLECTIONS: Available from the publisher, Wigestrand forlag AS, Norway.

An Intimate Retribution, translations by Eirik Lodén
mixed states, translations by Eirik Lodén
Fairy Tales and Soil, translations by Tor Obrestad

 

 

 

                                                                       
ANTHOLOGIES

Poets on Prozac
Ed. Richard M. Berlin, M.D.
Johns Hopkins University Press

Poets on Prozac shatters the notion that madness fuels creativity by giving voice to contemporary poets who have battled myriad psychiatric disorders. The sixteen essays collected here address many provocative questions: Does emotional distress inspire great work? Is artistry enhanced or diminished by mental illness?”

Letters to the World:
Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv Poetry
Ed. Moira Richards, Rosemary Starace, Lesley Wheeler. Ren Hen Press.

Letters to The World is the first anthology of its kind—a feminist collaboration born from The Discussion of Women’s Poetry Listserv (Wom-po), a vibrant, inclusive electronic community founded in 1997 by Annie Finch. Letters to The World is a remarkable example of how the Internet has radically rearranged associations among poets, editors, and readers.

See CV for full publication list.