Two Hemispheres

Shortlisted for the 2008 Pat Lowther Award, the 2008 Lampman Scott Award and the 2008 ReLit Awards. Imagining the lives of nineteenth-century women asylum patients, Nadine McInnis charts her descent into, and recovery from, depression. In the afterword to Two Hemispheres, McInnis describes her first encounter with the remarkable photographs that illustrate this moving volume. Patients of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, these women's names and stories are lost to history. McInnis imagines their experiences of mental illness as she explores her own journey through clinical depression, and finds in these haunting photographs solace and community. I used to embellish an impressive picture / of the woman whose palms / I mysteriously possess, describing her / right down to her mismatched shoes: / her gait, stiff and shuffling, from nights spent / sleeping under the bridge near the off-ramp, / her hair, a tangled nest of leaves and dead grass. -- from "Entertainment: a dramatic spectacle".