Walkin' Wounded

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

Fitzgerald’s style and subject matter are not for the timid or the
conventional. In Walkin’ Wounded, as in many of her collections of
verse, she has turned a major illness (schizophrenia) into poetry for
thought.

Fitzgerald wears her illness like a merit badge in “All in Your
Head” with its pounding refrain: “I lost vision. / You went crazy. /
I lost strength. / You went crazy. / I lost nets. / You went crazy.”
She pursues this theme in “How Do You Explain Schizophrenia to a
Hostile Neighbour?” where she pleads, “I want to tell my neighbour,
one above, I don’t know / the woman who throws plates and slams doors,
who / hollers at the ceiling, who storms the length of her apartment.”
She mixes media in the journalism-verse-narrative “Stompin’ and
Stuff” description of her performance on a radio show in Sudbury, and
savors wordplay (English and French), occasionally jumping from verse
into prose poetry as in “Slash.” None of these poems is meant to
soothe and caress; there is violence, clash, stress, and deliverance,
the strength of the once broken made whole. She experiments with form
and format, word and rhythm, always challenging the reader to keep pace.