The Autistic Alice

Joanne Limburg

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781780373447
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

THE AUTISTIC ALICE

Alice’s Un-Birthday

Alice is three and she knows it.

She’s sitting face-to-face with daffodils

underneath the washing-line

which is a roundabout for clothes.

Her mother pegs some clothes up,

gives them all a ride and pegs again.

Alice feels like trying something.

‘I’m four,’ she says.

‘No you’re not,’ her mother says,

‘you’re three.’ She picks Alice up

and pegs her to this rule:

It isn’t saying it that makes it true.

Alice in Check

The bedroom is a battle scene, Alice at one end,

her mother at the other: two queens on a chessboard.

Alice is outnumbered, but she holds her own,

because she fields the Knight Whose Name Is NO!

and boldly he has snicker-snacked his bloody way

straight through her mother’s forces. See them on the floor:

the Choking-Collar-Dress, the Orange-Flower-Yucky-Taste,

the Frilly-Dot-Bow-Monster. They want to make Alice

into a girl for looking at, stop her tongue

and force her skin to scream. They should be vanquished,

and would be, if Alice were allowed to win, but not today.

Her mother does the worse thing she could ever do:

Now look – you’ve made your Mummy cry!

The Knight Whose Name is NO! shakes his wet head

and Alice, who must save them all from being drowned,

gives up, and lets herself be dressed for looking at.

Alice in Reception Class

The paper’s waiting on the easel,

brushes in the pots, heads down.

They know how to do it here

and so does Alice: blue strip

makes the sky on top, green strip

lays grass along the bottom.

All the space between is hers.

House in it? Tree? Lady? No:

first line up what’s in the pots –

Splodge! goes yellow, orange,

Splodge! the red, the green, and

Splodge! the blue blue blue…

Teacher here: ‘That’s VERY GOOD!

What IS IT?’ ‘Splodges,’

Alice says, because they are.

‘Oh.’ The teacher sounds upset.

She goes. Alice watches colour dance.

Another teacher – different voice,

same words: ‘That’s VERY GOOD!’

What IS IT?’ ‘Fireworks?’

tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTENTS
• THE OXYGEN MAN
• THE AUTISTIC ALICE
• OTHER POEMS
• NOTES
• About the Author
• Copyright