“Asylum’s form—a hybrid, nonlinear series of numbered, untitled lyric poems and fragments—gives Bialosky’s lyric instincts a more epic platform, allowing her to play daringly and inquisitively with time and place . . . By turns symphonic, operatic, Dantean, intimate, timeless, and mythic, this quietly ambitious project is very much a book for the autumn of 2020.” —Lisa Russ Spaar, Los Angeles Review of Books
"As we grapple with a new normal, Jill Bialosky's poetry might be the antidote we all need. Her new book Asylum, a compilation of prose and poetry, evokes despair, survival—and most importantly, hope." —Katie Couric, Wake Up Call
"Haunted by her sister’s suicide and by political and environmental collapse, Bialosky finds refuge in nature and language, all the ways 'the mind seeks / to keep itself from torture.'" —The New York Times Book Review
“Her most ambitious work to date—demonstrates both searching consciousness about life and its meanings and a careful braiding of literary histories and contemporary influences . . . Inquiry unfolds through these poems as intellectual interest melded with open-hearted curiosity . . . Piecing together narrative from Dante or savoring meaning with Celan in the twentieth century delights the speaker in these poems. Bialosky rigorously grounds these poems in the literary traditions . . . With attention from both the mind and the heart to language’s sonorous resonances, transformation and reimagination are both at hand.” —Julie R. Enszer, Tikkun
“The elegiac fifth collection from Bialosky transcends genre, weaving tragedy, language, and perception in a poignant work of personal and public exploration . . . Here she explores language as an all-encompassing source of longing, consolation, redemption, and preservation . . . Erudite and devastating, Bialosky’s timely collection reverberates with a rare empathy and resilience.” —Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“This graceful, spiraling, often elegiac, always vivid book-length meditation casts shifting light on family, self, and the drama of the living world. Whatever is illuminated, so precisely, so gracefully, is also shadowed. [Bialosky’s] touch is light yet trenchant, her cadence entrancing, her wonder elating, her sorrows chilling . . . We enter ‘asylum of thought / & afterthought,’ the inner precincts of a poet tracing the nexus between mind and body, human and nature, life and death, while sheltering the small flame of hope, so tenuous, so necessary.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Reading Jill Bialosky’s poems feels like taking a slow and lone journey into the depth of the human heart, yet all the while being accompanied and guided by an intimate voice. An urgent and expansive book, Asylum is a must-read for anyone who ponders over life and death and all that comes in between.” —Yiyun Li
“Jill Bialosky’s Asylum is a collection of terse forms and psalms that add up to a powerful, full-throated deliverance. Each trope captures life and death matters—a singing, a keening, within each taut, well-made release. Rather than craving a physical space, asylum is sought in language, metaphor, meditation, yoga, query, and hope. And one of the joys of reading this collection is to feel its poignancy through verbal accretion. Asylum is experimental and, at times, nearly classical, but always intently alive with lyrical truths.” —Yusef Komunyakaa
“Bialosky’s strongest collection to date. So compelling is her vision, so urgent her perceptions, that her grief becomes our grief, her world ours. We are with her on every step of a search that ends in art, and in a language that can save us.” —Grace Schulman
“From personal story of a sister's suicide, to chants and whispers and lullabies assembled in a way as to create a book of days for this moment of terror and elegy, this book investigates into the ability of language to provide answers and comfort at the moment when there is no comfort to be found, and no answers: when all we can do is ‘at the edge of the Hudson to watch the tugboats / & remind ourselves we live on an island of buildings. / The mayor warned us not to go out.’ And yet, the poet insists—beautifully, gracefully, memorably—on seeking a sanctuary: ‘asylum / in which the mind seeks / to keep itself from torture, asylum of thought / & afterthought, asylum / where birds mate & nourish.’ Indeed. May we all find such asylum.” —Ilya Kaminsky
“A refuge; from grief, and from threat of extinction. Bialosky weaves together the big cosmic time of trees and the natural world, with the detailed, apparently ordinary time of one woman’s everyday life. The litany of memory, individual and collective, becomes fugue, becomes mantra. Whether you are a yoga lover, a tree lover, a mother, a reader, a sister, you will find something to love in this luminous collection.” —Sarah Ruhl
08/01/2020
In her fifth collection, Bialosky (The Players) presents a symphonic poem, a word quilt arranged in five parts and over 100 sections. Ricocheting themes, which return to provide different perspectives, include a sibling's suicide, the rewards and risks of family life, nature (both kind and cruel), and the Holocaust and other mass murders. The best poems utilize repetition to produce an incantatory quality: "snow that dusts/ bridges, highways, roofs,/ …insufferable snow that falls/ on the pots that hold/ the pods of the dead." Two poems set in Russia reveal the sense of dislocation caused by travel, "furloughed from my country, no longer mother to my son,/ wife to my husband, in my dreams always the same age." The book succeeds on many levels. Strongest are the poems on suicide and its permanent but dramatic effects on the family, while prose sections on yoga work less well, pulling readers out of the poem, and several sections consist of only a single line that doesn't always move the poem forward. In the end, though, this collection becomes much more than the sum of its parts. VERDICT Precise language, deft metaphors, and emotional undertones keep audiences invested and sometimes enthralled. Recommended for most collections—Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN
