Synopses & Reviews
Imagining the lives of nineteenth-century women asylum patients, Nadine McInnis charts her descent into, and recovery from, depression.
In the afterword to Two Hemispheres, McInnis describes her first encounter with the remarkable photographs that illustrate this moving volume. Patients of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, these women's names and stories are lost to history. McInnis imagines their experiences of mental illness as she explores her own journey through clinical depression, and finds in these haunting photographs solace and community.
In the medical world, the body is often described metaphorically as a machine. Physician-poet William Carlos Williams invoked a similar metaphor when he noted that a poem is a machine made of words. What intrigues me about Nadine McInnis's insightful collection of poems is how the mechanics of poetry serve to explore what can happen when we as human machines break down. Equally captivating in these evocative and sometimes disturbing poems is the historical impetus for their creation--Victorian medical photographs. Two Hemispheres truly acts as a causeway between past and present, health and illness, and the supposed vastly different worlds of arts and biomedicine. - Dr. J.T.H. Connor, John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, St. John's, Newfoundland
Synopsis
Poetry. TWO HEMISPHERES charts one woman's descent into, and recovery from, depression. Nadine McInnis finds solace and humanity in the faces of illness, and breaths an imagined life into the photographs of ten women, patients in the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in the mid-nineteenth century. Counterpointing the photographs and the voices of these lost women with her more personal experience of depression, she crafts a stunning tribute to the resilience of human spirit and mind. "I feel like I've uncovered a treasure--the mind's brilliance and transcendence embedded in a deep geology of love and pain, and which acquire purpose here. Such bright threads of thought, compassion and language as McInnis both discourses on and inhabits the imprisoned mind. I'm astonished at the strength and passion of these poems"--Marilyn Bowering. Nadine McInnis is the author of six other books: they include short stories and essays as well as poetry. Her most recent bollection of poetry was shortlisted for the 2006 Ottawa Book Award. She lives in Ottawa where she teaches in the Professional Writing Program at Algonquin College.
About the Author
McInnis was born in Belleville, Ontario in September, 1957, and grew up in Toronto and Ottawa. She attended Colonel By Secondary School, where she began a life-long friendship with the novelist, playwright and actor Ann-Marie MacDonald. She studied English Literature at the University of Ottawa, and after spending two years on Thunderchild Reserve, Saskatchewan and another two years on a farm near Livelong, Saskatchewan, she returned to Ottawa. She has two children, Nadia (born 1982) and Owen(born 1988), and is married to Tim Fairbairn. Among her seven books, Two Hemispheres (Brick Books, Fall 2007) is a book length poetic exploration of illness and health partially inspired by the first medical photographs of women patients of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in 1850. Ten photos are included. The book has been shortlisted for two national awards: the 2008 Pat Lowther Award and the 2008 ReLit Award, as well as the regional Archibald Lampman Award for the city of Ottawa. McInnis' work has appeared in a variety of journals, including The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Event, and Room of One's Own. McInnis has published widely in magazines in Canada and is a past winner of a CBC literary award and the Ottawa Book Award. She joined the faculty of Algonquin College in 2006, after working as a policy analyst in the Canadian federal government where she focused on the publishing industries in Canada.