Book Review: Letters to My Lover from Behind Asylum Walls

Patrick Pierre

Letters to My Lover from Behind Asylum Walls by Robin Sinclair, Cosmographia, 2018

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

As a Bipolar I individual, now treated, I often recall my visits to the state psychiatric ward, the phantasmagoric experience of losing one’s mind. It’s hard to describe to people who’ve never been through it. It’s like your subconscious vomits, a purge of the soul, and you bend to the force of your own hallucinations. The objective world waits on the periphery, the sterile touch of normativity infringing on the subjective dreamworld, a distant calling. It is a terrifying experience. But I’d be lying if I said it was all terrifying. It’s also exhilarating. I’ve never felt more in tune with the power of love.

It’s an experience described in Robin Sinclair’s richly rendered and visionary poetry collection, Letters to My Lover from Behind Asylum Walls. The 28 poems in this collection are written from the perspective of a psychiatric patient in an institution, “Sweet Jane,” penning letters to their beloved, Eleanor. The epistolary poems describe the conditions of the institution, the speaker’s tenuous grip on objective reality, the sinister machinations of the doctors and nurses and other patients, and the deep well of love and longing for someone outside the walls, on the other side. The relationship is a queer one, and there are indications the speaker of the poems is genderqueer. This adds a complexity — a dimension of sexuality — that undermines not only the neurotypical, but heteronormativity. It’s never quite clear what the speaker suffers from, though notes from the doctor, interspersed between poems, point to schizoaffective disorder, major depressive personality disorder, or borderline personality disorder. But the clinical labels seem inadequate against the vivid effusion of thought and sentiment from the patient.

Sweet Jane believes their love to be true knowledge, not to be dismissed as emotion: “It was belief in the ocean by someone who’s never / seen it…Waiting for a flutter of color in your chest / and mine.”

In contrast to this inner clear perception of love, the institution scolds “with silence. They punish with mystery.”

The institution is punitive, feels punitive, and the patient and other patients gravitate toward the suicidal in response: “It’s a dreadful chore, really, / staying alive.”

But what keeps Sweet Jane alive is their faith in love. Sinclair offers one touching passage after another: “I trust you, who isn’t here, / to know my future’s worth / better than I do.”

These lines slayed me, in the best way. When I was hospitalized, I’d call my spouse every hour just to hear her voice. The nurses eventually shut me off, and my spouse had to tell me I couldn’t call anymore because staff was getting mad, but just knowing my love was there, outside the walls, was a lifeline — a warm, crackling kind of light I could feel even in the darkest solitude.

And these poems turn dark, more expressionistic. The gray dawn has “hot anvil eyes.” Human need itself becomes almost insurmountable as Sweet Jane spirals. They ache to be touched “without cynicism or violence,” hinting to past abuse. Even in the deranged density of a nightmare, Sweet Jane retains agency: “Delicate hand on an ageless casket, / I have made my choices. / I have made my choice.”

The ending almost makes the whole series a moral parable. There is a reckoning. A sense of self emerges from the mind’s ruins. Is it self-love? Is Eleanor even real? Maybe it doesn’t matter because the love is real.

Sinclair has fashioned poems for the ages here. Letters to My Lover from Behind Asylum Walls is a harrowing gothic read: true to experience, true to the madness of love, and true to the humanity it so tenderly offers.