The Autistic Alice

By Joanne Limburg

There are two acts of recovery in this book – one of a lost brother, and another of a lost self. Joanne Limburg commemorates both in her third collection, The Autistic Alice. In its title-sequence she uses Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to explore her own experiences as a girl and young woman. Growing up with undiagnosed Asperger’s, she often identified with Alice, a logical and curious child adrift in an arbitrary world. Collaging lines and phrases drawn from the two Alice books, she creates a disturbingly effective language to express the nature, discomfort and alienation of autistic experiences. In her neurodiverse verse, a text can become a rabbit-hole to another world, or a mirror. The poems that make up the book’s opening sequence, The Oxygen Man, originally published as a pamphlet, were written in response to the death of Limburg’s younger brother, a brilliant chemist who took his own life in 2008. They follow her as she visits the mid-Western town where he lived, worked and died; range back over their shared childhood; and look ahead as she tries to work out what it means to be the one who stays behind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781780373447

Book preview

THE OXYGEN MAN

Sister

She will harrow this town, she will turn him up,

whole or in pieces. Being a sister,

she knows that brothers are born to trouble.

Her part is to rescue him,

lend him a heart to face his enemies,

or failing that, confound them herself

with withheld smiles, or with her sharp

big sister’s tongue; and if she finds

them gone to ground, their damage done,

she’ll cut the losses for both of them

and seek him out, wherever he’s lying,

broken and say, Brother, there’s

no shame in one lost battle, or

in ten. Put the phial down –

don’t drink! And if it is too late

for that, she’ll scruff the man and stick

her fingers down his throat, or find

an antidote, or make her own,

or heave time back, or failing that,

and even failing that, she’ll take him home,

and never mind how small the pieces.

Brother

‘Hi,’ you said, whenever I picked up: your name

was never asked for. Of course I knew your