Synopsis "The Blue Wife Poems"
Reading The Blue Wife Poems, I think of Adam Zagajewski: "Only in the beauty created / by others is there consolation, / in the music of others and in others' poems." To consolation, I would add solace. I would add awe at the transformation of pain into beauty. This is what I ask for in poetry, and what Hayley Mitchell Haugen delivers in this small, perfect collection. This book dazzles in its unflinching look at the legacy of secrecy and shame surrounding the horrid betrayal of a child. A betrayal bequeathing a legacy of depression and unease. This book dazzles in its technical fluency, finding just the right vessels to hold pain transformed.- Donna Hilbert, author of ThrenodyI've read a lot of books about depression, but few as hauntingly accurate as Hayley Mitchell Haugen's The Blue Wife Poems. Refusing simple explanations, Haugen instead takes us inside both the body and the brain. Finding words where words most often fail, the poet recreates the darkness that surrounds, engulfs, flees, circles back, continues. Through startling imagery, mesmerizing cadence, and the repetitions of villanelle and sonnet sequence, Haugen leads us through the nightmare horror and haze of medications, molestation, and society's often unhelpful response to mental illness - and women sufferers in particular. And, yet, where "hope...is the firefly. . . too fleeting to light the way," this writer gives us poems to see by.- Marjorie Maddox, author of Heart Speaks, Is Spoken ForIn the Blue Wife Poems, Hayley Mitchell Haugen enters the house of depression armed with the rough truth of flatness, a blade used to cut and be cut by, "like when the yellow butterfly snap closed its wings and revealed a shock of blue." These poems feel like what you see after your last round of chemo, silver-blue metaphors dying on bones they once called home. Sadness cannot afford these poems not in the market where madness and miracle secretly meet to exchangenotes that find their way into your hands.- Daniel Edward Moore author of Boys and Waxing the Dents
