Patterns of Mourning

DescriptionPatterns of Mourning began after a tragic bereavement and takes the course of a damaging love-affair in which the narrator becomes increasingly unstable and detached from reality. Written by a young mother coming-of-age, suffering the trauma of a severe Manic-Depressive Episode, this vivid account of grief, loneliness and love is a sprawling, relentless confessional poem, composed by pastiche of deconstructed emails, letters and delineated manic, longhand prose. Written over the course of the narrator's breakdown and whilst in psychiatric care, nightmares both lived and imagined conjure obsessive hallucinatory manifestations to form an ecstatic and melancholic diary of all the inner processes of one going mad, alone. About the AuthorMelissa Lee-Houghton is a Northern writer of poetry and prose. She is currently working on her first full collection of poems and writes for The Short Review. Born in 1982 in Wythenshawe, Manchester, she has lived in Lancashire all her adult life after uprooting due to family breakdown. Taken out of school at 13 to attend a child psychiatric unit, it became obvious to those around her that she was intense and troubled, and episodes of self-harm during severe anxiety and depression led to her being admitted and assessed in psychiatric care, aged 14. Diagnosed with Bipolar Affective Disorder at 15, Melissa has suffered numerous episodes which resulted in severe personal trauma and a chronic battle with medications. She suffered post-natal depression as a single teenage parent, and experienced harrowing puerperal psychosis after the birth of her second child, in 2006.