Books by Mary Rose O'Reilley

It's 1923 and Annie O'Leary has made a rational and even beautiful life for herself on the back ward of a state asylum, where she's confined for a terrible crime she doesn't remember committing. She writes poetry, helps the nurses, and sings old hymns off the back porch. Then a new patient arrives to change all the equations. Lucy Valenta, a young art student, needs to get back in her right mind and bring her enormous gift into the world. The bond between the two women is deep and quick with hope: of making family, of making art, and forming a pact of transformation. The enigmatic psychiatrist, Dr. David Grafton, wants to help Annie retrieve her history, invoking the new techniques of psychoanalysis-but he himself is a wounded healer, traumatized by his recent experience of trench warfare. Each must hold in tension the power of memory to liberate and destroy. Each must dare the millrace of-- call it-- love.

In her new collection, Earth, Mercy, Mary Rose O'Reilley sifts through the debris of human habitation - pink thong sandals, curlers, broken televisions - looking for a kind of junkyard grace: "Holiness enters again / turquoise fins, and the Cessna's carapace / lifts on its wind."

A spiritual biography wound backwards, spiraling into the world rather than out of it. Though it reflects on the paradoxes of our violent times, Mary Rose O'Reilley's collection hangs on to life like the bee "up to his hips in love" who "will fall asleep in the snow" and "wake up still kissing his flower."