6/6
And
the last thing he saw, as the black wave of the pit closed over him,
was a boat, a small wooden rowing boat, sailing empty-handed
into the sky.

(“The Solution”)

5
Later, after the un-introduced “he” has determined to escape his home in a boat, a huge crack appears and swallows up the house, the street, him…

4
Something was coming in, And going out again. Coming
in. And going out again. Unable to make up its mind. Something /
he could not see. Of unrecognisable shape. Something he sensed
only. With the hairs on his skin.

(“Moving”)

3
The poet sets his scene with the section entitled “Home”–but what a home it is! This home is a spooky claustrophobic place, narrated in prose poetry and with the distancing of third person. The home, this house, is new, beautiful and modern…yet:

2
The index shows a listing of three dozen or so poem titles and page numbers but like footsteps on a path, the pieces are not so much discrete individual poems as the parts of a larger whole.

1
The phrase “light and after” suggests some sort of journey or exploration and that is how this collection reads to me.

11/11
One person, in their commentary on the letters, describes their visual composition, as one would a painting, and adds that they are “not really designed for correspondence.”

10
Sometimes, there is a pane of glass so thick between speaking and understanding, between the human search for words and the listening ear.

9
Instead of a woman removed from her loved ones, she is a madwoman, incurable, creating a piece of “art brut” that is, in Prinzhorn’s words, “the nearest to zero point on the scale of composition.”
The letters were never sent.

8
Was Hauck going unheard the fault of the concept of “art brut” itself? “Outsider art”? By saying, “This is outside of me, my experience, my humanity,” is that where we decide to no longer listen, to deny someone a chance to exist as a person?

7
They had been found in the archives of the University of Heidelberg and added to the Prinzhorn Collection. Some of the letters read simply, “komm, komm, komm.” Come, come, come. According to hospital records, she asked after her family relentlessly.

6
They are the same words, written again and again, the same phrase, “Herzenschatzi komm,” hundreds of thousands of times: “Sweetheart, come.”
They were written by Hauck to her husband, Mark, who in the records was noted as “absent.” And they were never sent.

5
Hauck’s letters, contained in this part of the collection, are sometimes so thickly crowded with words that they are illegible, parts of the paper plain gray where the words disappear into each other.

4
They collected some five thousand items, and the collection tours the world to this day. One of the most famous parts of the exhibition, and one that is frequently referred to by visitors to the exhibition as “profoundly moving,” “heartbreaking,” “haunting,” is an alcove containing letters.

3
The same year she was admitted, doctors at the University of Heidelberg set out to collect art created by people suffering from some sort of mental illness. The collection they assembled came to be known as the Prinzhorn Collection, after Hans Prinzhorn, the first director of the program.

2
She was diagnosed with dementia praecox, now known as schizophrenia. Eventually, her illness was deemed chronic, “unheilbar,” and she was transferred to Wiesloch Asylum, where she died eleven years later.

1
Sometimes the story is so small and simple it breaks the heart. Emma Hauck, a thirty-year-old mother and wife, was admitted to the psychiatric hospital of the University of Heidelberg in Germany in February 1909.

love and loss, memory and acts of witnessing. Faced with this rich array of work, I have made out of it a collage of many dimensions, rather than doggedly trying to pursue specific themes or approaches."

Gone is the overriding, enclosing effort of concentration on a single predicament. Instead, the reader will discover outward reaching poems that record movement through time and space, experiments in language and translation, alongside enduring touchstones such as