Flying Wounded

"Flying Wounded," Susan McCaslin's seventh book of poetry, is a daring exploration of the disturbance wreaked on a daughter by her mother's ill-treated, then untreated, mental illness and of the daughter's almost miraculous transformation. The first half of the book charts the decline of the mother, "a boisterous southern woman of voluminous laughter" who finds herself "incarcerated in an inquisitional tower." The tower is both the asylum (a university hospital) and, later, her own phobic existence as a "mall bag lady."