A review of The Suicide Tourist by Myna Wallin
I’m a tough audience for any writing that takes mental illness as its subject. I find it nearly impossible to sit still for this; my very teeth itch at the first mention of prescription drugs, or therapy, or hospitalization. These are bedeviled subjects to tackle. I’m not into name-dropping nostrums for status at the sympathy club. In general, I’d rather hear about how you see the world beyond its necessary confines. Lucky for all of us, Myna Wallin has more going for her poetry than pity points.
Wallin, who lives in Toronto, Canada, has written two previous volumes of poetry (A Thousand Profane Pieces and Anatomy of an Injury) and a novel since 2006.
The Suicide Tourist (2024, Ekstasis Editions) is a volume of 46 poems over 92 pages that reveals Wallin’s fight with bipolar. For her, the disease manifests as peaks and valleys marked, in part, by manic spending sprees. Some of these poems strike me as stiff or leaving something on the table, while others strife hot and penetrant as fireballs. That’s a good thing, for me – I like being stopped short on a line that brands human insight onto my brain.
I believe anyone who knows bipolar will find themselves here, those seeking the gritty details of life on the ward and in the pill line as well as those looking for more panoramic views of life on earth. People unfamiliar with the diagnosis will find commonality here, too. After all, not a single one of us gets out of an existence “between…life and threat” (from the poem “Tiny Monsters”).
A poem like “Inventory” portrays, for me, that mixed state of bipolar I so often experience, but could just as easily be read as a send-up of ineffectual medical forms, or a ballad of grief. And who hasn’t felt that “3 a.m. Tango”? It’s the deep-night torture chamber where “My brain is an infinite looking glass / trapped in a fun house. / I grew taller for a while, / now smaller. Much smaller.”
Wallin offers riches in the way of specific commiseration with fellow mentally ill readers. “This is what comes of taking candy from a stranger,” she notes in “Speed Dating with Professionals,” a round-robin of psychiatric treatment. Or “Withdrawal,” a poem saturated with stark visuals, by turns oppressive and blade-sharp; “An Explosion of Roses” is for its part sumptuous, feverish.
In “Meditation on the Last Squirrel,” “Each day’s activity is broken / into less coherent parts / as I bluff my way through seasons – / finding death, the nut of everything, / seething underbrush, amongst sideways trees.”
At times, Wallin veers surreal or humorous (or both), which I find deeply rewarding. “Your worst fear / non-existence, / arrives like a dusty old bus you were / waiting for all along. There’s nothing / and no one on it, / no grief, debt, recrimination, no snacks” (from “Vapour”).
There are also scorching poetic scenes of everyday people and encounters. These highlight Wallin’s powers of observation and the devastating direct quote. Try “Down the Hall” and “Daguerreotype.”
About halfway through the collection, the poems turn toward physical malady, medical evaluations, and the professionals who probe their way “into the intersection of hope and fear, that spongy spot where something akin to faith resides” (“Intersection”).
“Writers are bipolar by nature and by nature extreme,” Donald Hall writes in Life Work. Hall was married to acclaimed poet Jane Kenyon, herself manic depressive. As writers, as readers, we’re always hunting for that day with “The sky as clear / as a new journal page” (“It Was a Beautiful Day in Prospect Park”), the day hypomania and productivity fortify instead of depression and ill luck collude, but there are pitfalls around every corner. Not just writers, but all of us know the scene where cosmic chance offers us the new start, but is it fresh or false? “There are always shouters / and listeners, offered a choice: / ‘Paradise or Inferno,’ / Like Walk/Don’t Walk.”
The poem “Late” yields perhaps my favorite line, one that for me invokes bipolar author Scott Neuffer and his descriptions imbuing landscapes with thought: “You can’t know what night is / until you’ve embraced it / like a wicked deed / you’ve made your own.”
A fitting close to the volume comes with “Terrarium.” For me, this poem encapsulates the phenomenon of life and threat that Wallin courts throughout. A captive life all about safety is no life, is it? We must exist in the wilds with others, with racing anxieties, with a truly unboxed reality – the survival skills will come.
– Kate Ardis Oden, Editor
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