The Broken Word

By Alan Hill

Alan Hill takes us through the dark underworld of growing up with his brother's mental illness and its effects on the family unit. Vivid imagery and vibrant metaphors and energy pulsate on every page. You ARE there!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Silver Bow Publishing
• Release date: Jul 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781927616086

Book preview

The Broken Word

By Alan Hill

License Notes

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copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

Cover Art: In That Other Place by Candice James

Cover Design: Janet Kvammen

Layout & Design: Candice James

Editing: Candice James

All rights reserved including the right to reproduce or translate

this book or any portions thereof, in any form

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

First Edition

ISBN 978-1-927616-08-6

© 2013 Silver Bow Publishing

Silver Bow Publishing

Box 5 - 720 Sixth St.,

New Westminster, BC

V3L 3C5 CANADA

Email: [e-mail]

Website: http://silverbowpublishing.shawwebspace.ca

The Broken Word

Introduction

This book is a story of brothers and an illness and the illnesses that came

after. I was made as a person, for good and bad, by the experience of

growing up with an older brother who had a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Poems written directly about that time are interspersed and framed by work

concerning people and situations written forty years and a continent away

from those original experiences that formed me.

I grew up in England in the nineteen seventies, a place in some ways so

different from the world we now live in that it could have been the eighteen

seventies. However I would hope that many of the themes touched on in these

poems are universal enough to travel across borders and decades, even if the

travel documentation may be somewhat muddled and the roads laid out by

time not as straight as they could be. Many of these poems are

autobiographical although there are also poems which, in the true Hollywood

get out of jail clause, are ‘based on a true story’.

I dedicate this book to my brother Christopher John Hill who will probably

not read it and to whom I will probably never be the brother I could and

should be.

As Nietzsche once wrote "You must have chaos within you to give birth to a

dancing star." With this quote in mind I present to you my constellation.

Alan Hill

New Westminster, British Columbia,

March 23rd 2013.

Come On In

In this beginning -

which is also the