Dear Alice: Narratives of Madness

Tom Pow's powerful new collection of poetry explores the imaginative legacy of a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum, the Crichton, drawing on the richly-documented history of the site. This remarkable book includes the sequence 'Resistances' gathered from female patients' notes, but Pow brings many others within his compass: Nebuchadnezzar, Tom Thumb, Peter Pan, Charcot (Master of Salpetriere, the female asylum in Paris, 'that great emporium of human misery'), all make an appearance, as do Freud and the Wolf Man. The Crichton Lunatic Asylum was at the forefront of the great nineteenth century European-wide 'trade in lunacy' - a period when old assurances were crumbling and our modern sense of the permeability of identity was being formed.