Lock Her Up

"Tina Parker's haunting new collection Lock Her Up is a tribute, a beautifully rendered defense of women who throughout the late 1800s and mid-1900s were admitted into the Southwestern Lunatic Asylum in Virginia. It is an examination of the platitudes, misdiagnoses and treatments administered to women who needed succor not restraint, understanding not punishment; women who had been set aside by their families or bored husbands, were abused, widowed or their children dead or taken from them. This poet has done her research. "The day they came for me/ I cartwheeled into the sea/ And sang open the snow." Reader, you will wince, you will curse, you will weep." -Kari Gunter-Seymour