We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders

Name: We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders
SKU: 4909
Price: 16.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Phoebe Sparrow Wagner (formerly Pamela Spiro Wagner)

$16.00

A collection of poems written over the course of twenty-five years as the author struggled to live with a devastating mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia. The poems bear witness to the innumerable ways a life can go off course from the inside out – from the small disasters of everyday life, to the devastation of suicide. Schizophrenia is a frightening disease, a psychiatric illness that lies for most people in an uncharted wilderness.
Comments from the poet’s psychiatrist provide a fascinating counter-point to the poems themselves – a kind of dialogue between poet and doctor that seems to mirror the therapeutic one. Readers follow Pamela Spiro Wagner’s journey, taking a personal tour through madness and back again.

Categories: All Books, LaurelBooks, Pamela Spiro Wagner, Poetry Tags: Pamela Spiro Wagner, We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders

Meet the Author

PHOEBE SPARROW WAGNER is an award-winning writer who lives with schizophrenia complicated by narcolepsy and CNS Lyme disease. She graduated from Brown University and briefly attended medical school. Despite having spent at least eight years of her life in psychiatric units, she co-authored Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and their Journey through Schizophrenia (St. Martin’s Press, 2005), which was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. Presently she writes WAGBlog at wagblog.wordpress.com and is at work on another book.

Critic Reviews

These poems are the work of a first-rate writer, one who has sounded the well of her own suffering to retrieve the wherewithal to transform pain into the most powerful and moving literature.
— Richard Selzer, Surgeon and Author

Pam Wagner has an exquisite voice that is quite marvelous. With precise language, and using memories from childhood and her struggle as a diagnosed “mentally ill” woman, she provides a strong and effective mirror to herself and the rest of the world.
— Leonard Cirino, Pygmy Forest Press