An Elastic State of Mind

Florence Noiville Literary Miniatures Teresa Lavender Fagan, tr. Seagull Books This volume includes twenty-eight interviews of renowned authors conducted by Florence Noiville for publication in Le Monde. She chats with the likes of Nadine Gordimer, John Le Carré, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Toni Morrison, painting evocative portraits of each. Her book represents a rich exploration of modern international literature through the lives and words of its creators. Janet McAdams Red Weather University of Arizona Press When Neva’s marriage falls apart, she is motivated to undertake a physical journey in search of her missing parents and indigenous heritage, and an emotional journey to find what is missing within herself. Her perilous travels take her to a small Central American country in the midst of political and military upheaval. Janet McAdams captures each moment of longing and discovery with skillful and delicately nuanced prose. Nota Bene Dump”) or with the possibilities of your own life (“The Old Men”). The richness of this volume, the “more than,” is certainly reflected in the coda, in which a lonely Pascal, here a time traveler, writes to an unresponsive beloved from different places, from a bustling nineteenth-century Paris to second-century Rome, to LA and back to France. While the letters are hardly in the neighborhood otherwise created, they are passages to presence and loss, remoteness and nearness always joined in Benjamin Myers’s poetry. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Ren Powell. An Elastic State of Mind: D.L.D.’s Autobiography in Poems. Eirik Lodén, tr. Stavanger, Norway. Wigestrand. 2012. isbn 9788281401150 Partly a poetic biography of Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802–87), partly the portrait of an epoch, An Elastic State of Mind resonates between character and author in an intimate and subtle construct . An American who traveled frequently to Europe, D.L.D. was a powerfulwomaninfrailhealth ,acrusaderfor prison and mental-institution reform in the United States, England, and Japan. Afflicted with what she called her “nothing” disease, a bipolar disorder , she was able to keep it under control through a rigorous moral routine. She was an antebellum celebrity and a published author. During the Civil War, she was appointed to the highest public office ever held by a woman in the United States, that of superintendent of army nurses for the Union. Ren Powell devoted her recent doctoral work in creative writing to D.L.D., who has long fascinated her. To prepare this volume, she inhabited the mind of her character and played out the scenes like an actor. Her choice of events, while drawing deeply from D.L.D.’s writings and artifacts, was guided by the affinities between her and her character. Powell and D.L.D. experienced difficult childhoods, lost loved ones in tragic circumstances, and chose exile. Both possess an intimate knowledge of and compassion for mental and physical suffering; both teach, fight on behalf of human rights, maintain a global outreach, and write in a multitude of registers. The poems use variations on traditional forms. Sonnets in prose, villanelles with recurring lines, sestinas with modified verse count, English mad songs, and even free-verse poems create carefully controlled imbalances. Such formal disobedience affirms the uniqueness of D.L.D.’s life, but, more importantly, it makes the poems accessible to the untrained reader. Also, the choice of popular poetic forms that were once sung allows Powell to create a seamless thought and sound current between her language and D.L.D.’s. References to greening, thread, and weave further reinforce a sense of organic fluidity that provides a healing counterpoint to the confines of prisons, asylums, and madness. Image by image, the tapestry of D.L.D.’s life emerges in three acts: childhood and initiation; maturity; and the declining years. An Elastic State of Mind is highly effective in documenting through the aesthetics of poetry the issue of bipolar disorders that affect so many creative people. At the moment of death, D.L.D./Powell says, September–October 2013 • 71 72 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews “My life was formed by keen distractions designed to control / my body’s great awakening, which brought to bloom / the passion upon which I had wagered my soul

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