Join us on Thursday, June 22nd at 5:30 pm for an In Conversation event with poet Len Lawson. He’ll be chatting about his latest poetry collection Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane. We’re excited to have Len in store with us and can’t wait to hear all about his writing processes and inspirations. So don’t miss out on this free event!
ABOUT THE POETRY COLLECTION
Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane enters the maelstrom of institutionalized racism and cruelty to aim an unflinching gaze at the violence, neglect, and delusions borne of Southern race ritual. These poems wield knives against slavery’s tumultuous afterlife, cutting us free, guiding us through thickets of scar tissue and nightmare till we glean the brutal clarity of American sin and bear witness to the wondrous power of Len Lawson’s artistic and historical imagination. ~Herman Beavers
Len Lawson is, above all, a talented lyricist whose candid chronicles of working in the field of mental illness—the patients’ trauma caused largely by the institutions supposed to treat and protect them—provides an insight into a realm plagued by racism and abuse, one often ignored and silenced by the world at the large. We come to learn of Lawson’s speaker’s interactions with Brock Bridges who “loved butterflies” and often too tried to escape the establishment, “thinking like the statue/chewing petals off that flower.” Though the speaker tries to keep a line between him and his patients, dealing with his own issues concerning his own happiness and the weight of family memory and present circumstances, all their lives are intertwined even in times of doubt: “I didn’t trust those butterflies like Brock did…Matter of fact I hate butterflies//They give people false hope//Everything can’t have wings/Everybody wasn’t made to fly//Ask all them Africans that didn’t/grow wings still on the plantation.” Lawson explores the larger implications of historical violence and survival, never flinching away (” If you show me this box/hovering up and down/heaven and earth,/I will show you/a casket/lowered into/a world’s eye”) through a variety of many (often experimental) free verse possibilities, and I too can be candid, this is one of the best collections of poetry I’ve ever read. Get it now. Lawson is going places. ~Rose Ben-Oni
Lawson’s Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane constructs a fictional institution based on actual 20th century mental asylums for Black people. This haunting, stark series of vignettes of people who occupy such spaces traverse through surprising and dangerous spaces in the mind. History starts surrounding us as an eerie specter seeping into the present, where mental health is now a demand as part of freedom in America. ~Tara Betts, author of Refuse to Disappear
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Len Lawson is author of Chime (Get Fresh Books, 2019) and co-editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Press, 2021). He received a 2022 Fresh Voices in the Humanities Governor’s Award from South Carolina Humanities. Len has earned fellowships from Tin House, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Callaloo, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts among others. His poetry appears in African American Review, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, Verse Daily, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. A South Carolina native, Len earned a PhD in English Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.