The Autistic Alice - Paperback

by Joanne Limburg (Author)

There are two acts of recovery in this book - one of a lost brother, and another of a lost self. Joanne Limburg commemorates both in her third collection, The Autistic Alice. In its title-sequence she uses Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to explore her own experiences as a girl and young woman. Growing up with undiagnosed Asperger's, she often identified with Alice, a logical and curious child adrift in an arbitrary world. Collaging lines and phrases drawn from the two Alice books, she creates a disturbingly effective language to express the nature, discomfort and alienation of autistic experiences. In her neurodiverse verse, a text can become a rabbit-hole to another world, or a mirror. The poems that make up the book's opening sequence, The Oxygen Man, originally published as a pamphlet, were written in response to the death of Limburg's younger brother, a brilliant chemist who took his own life in 2008. They follow her as she visits the mid-Western town where he lived, worked and died; range back over their shared childhood; and look ahead as she tries to work out what it means to be the one who stays behind.

Author Biography

Joanne Limburg was born in London in 1970, and studied Philosophy at Cambridge. She has since gained an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies, worked as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University, and was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Magdalen College, Cambridge, from 2008 to 2010. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1998, and her first book, Femenismo (Bloodaxe Books, 2000), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second collection, Paraphernalia (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her third, The Autistic Alice, was published by Bloodaxe in 2017. Her other books include The Woman Who Thought Too Much (Atlantic Books, 2010), a memoir about OCD, anxiety and poetry; Bookside Down: poems for the modern, discerning cyber-kid (Salt Publishing, 2013), an anthology for younger readers; and one novel, A Want of Kindness: a novel of Queen Anne (Atlantic Books, 2015).