Description
"About the Book The poems of Straight Jacket gather bravely at the intersection between LGBTQ identity and the politics of illness, speaking to the consequences of homophobia and social injustice, entering into the horrors of commitment, and doing fierce linguistic battle with the language of mental illness and stigma. Book Synopsis The poems of Straight Jacket gather bravely at the intersection between LGBTQ identity and the politics of illness, and speak to the consequences of homophobia and social injustice. The book takes readers into the horrors of being committed into a mental hospital and does fierce linguistic battle with stigma, offering witness to failures within the mental health system and demonstrating expressions of the indomitable spirit's restlessness in times of helplessness and adversity. The collection chronicles in a personal way the oppressive experiences of dehumanization and institutionalization. Review Quotes The poems in Straight Jacket document the profoundly subversive process of a woman who is saving her own life--or, in the words of feminist poet Robin Morgan, the process of a woman who is ""going sane."" Jessica Lowell Mason, a self-described psychiatric industry survivor, has been to hell and back, and, with her fierce writing, she is marking the trail for others who have the courage to retrieve our stigmatized selves from a slough of hetero-patriarchal lies. --Carolyn Gage , playwright and activist I do not read a lot of poetry, but this is phenomenal writing, and that would be enough, but it is rich in forbidden insights, revealing worlds of experience hidden from view with revelatory clarity. Pure genius: I've never seen anything like it. --Max Dashu , Founder, Suppressed Histories Archives JLM has written a chapbook that defies the reader to put it down. In a variety of poetic styles, she creates both a realistic and imaginative description of psychiatric malpractice and its impact on a sane woman incarcerated... in a place almost guaranteed to make one insane. This is poetry at its finest, fiercest, and fully-present. --Kathleen Bryce Niles , Editor Emerita, The Comstock Review"
