Madwoman - by Shara McCallum (Paperback)

About the Book

Poems progress through the wilds of the mind and memory, dispatching parables, and challenging of the myth of self.

Book Synopsis

Haunting, alarming, transformative, and elusive, these poems bridge together the gaps between development stages: from girl, to woman, and then mother. With the complexities that intertwine them, can you be all three at once? Who shapes our identity, and who is in control here? How do we recognize, acknowledge, and honor the changing of who we are?

Review Quotes

". . . McCallum beautifully incorporates the patois of her native Jamaica and employs myth as a way to deal with the mistakes and hurts of the past. [Her] striking poems take the madwoman out of her attic so that she may walk and speak among the living."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"...[Madwoman] has earned my very highest recommendation and praise."
--Karen Craigo, Literary Mama

"[In Madwoman]. . .madness becomes enmeshed with the politics of (in)visibility and (un)belonging."
--Wasafiri

"...Shara McCallum collapses the binary definition of woman as either angel or monster, reclaiming the madwoman as a mythic force...She is wildly complex, ferociously ambiguous."
--The Pleiades Book Review

"McCallum's words linger so that we may pick them up again, examine them like thoughts or whispers."
--Rain Taxi

"Madwoman may be semi-autobiographical (most poems are), but, certainly, it reflects those voices living on the margins of society, voices full of authenticity, truth and lived experience but which are often unheard. Shara McCallum reminds us they are worth hearing by bringing us into their complex world."
--Poetry Matters

"In a major way, McCallum peels off the layers of what it is to be a woman. She jettisons poetic forms and can exact poetic norms without waiting for a reaction."
--Washington Independent Review of Books

"McCallum's poems read like a woman with an embroidery needle, looking out at the horizon while very attuned to the pattern she is creating with her thread."
--Opal Palmer Adisa

"Female identity and cultural heritage entwine in this fierce, skillfully composed collection of poems."
--Shelf Awareness

"The persona of 'Madwoman's' contradictory conscience and memory strikes a dialogue with the poet's younger self, and a sense of loss shadows all. . . . [A] beautifully designed book."
--San Antonio Express-News

"There is a hunger in these lines that is furious and electrifying."
--Nervous Poodle Poetry

"Shara McCallum is like a great marathoner traversing myth, mind, and memory. Her work steers us through the heart of troubled landscapes, as well as the landscapes of the troubled heart. 'In the country where she lives which is no country, the madwoman maps desire's coordinates onto her body, ' she writes in this wise, fiery new collection. There are no other poets writing with McCallum's beautiful intensities of form and feeling."
--Terrance Hayes

"These wonderful poems open a world of sensation and memory. But it is a world revealed by language, never just controlled. The voice that guides the action here is openhearted and openminded--a lyric presence that never deserts the subject or the reader. Syntax, craft and cadence add to the gathering music from poem to poem with--to use a beautiful phrase from the book, 'each note tethering sound to meaning.'"
--Eavan Boland

About the Author

Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of four books of poetry: The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011); This Strange Land (Alice James Books, US, 2011), a finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 2003); and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 1999), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry. Her fifth book, Madwoman, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2017. Recognition for her poetry includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her poems and personal essays have been published in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks in the US, the UK, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel and have been translated into Spanish, French, and Romanian. Since 2003, McCallum has been the Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and a Professor of creative writing and literature at Bucknell University.