The Suicide Tourist
A significant challenge of bipolar illness is the difficulty in making coherent decisions; one becomes an unreliable narrator in one’s own life. In this mental health confessional, poems about depression, mania, suicidal ideation, and the challenge of living with these disabilities are tackled with naked honesty and deep humour. In The Suicide Tourist, Wallin supersedes the stigma surrounding mental illness and excavates the themes of anxiety, fear, instability, mortality, and ultimately, liberation. [Buy the book]
“The Suicide Tourist, a collection of poems by Myna Wallin, is a cohesive set of works examining her experiences with mental illness, ranging from the very high highs and the concerning lows. Wallin leaves no stone unturned in this collection, probing her memories to figure out what was real and what wasn’t, as well as coming to terms with being an unreliable narrator of her own life, and what it means to be disabled in a world that has yet to accept the less “challenging” forms of mental illness.
This collection is also an excavation of the ways medical misogyny complicates treatment for mental illness in women. In “Snake Eyes,” Wallin details how she seems fine, but knows she isn’t: “She has no abnormalities in cognition, / perception, or speech.” Dotting the poem with notes about her as a patient makes the situation all the more frustrating.
What I really liked about The Suicide Tourist, despite or maybe in spite of the serious subject matter, is that Wallin works very hard to present her whole self in these poems. They are vulnerable, exploring what happened to her as a disabled person, and as someone with a debilitating but invisible illness, and they’re also joyful. In “Spring,” Wallin takes a moment to enjoy the simple sounds of the world waking up again:
I hear birds tweeting return
in their dirty plumage. Coloured
orbs, leaping dogs; the park’s happy squeals.
Green noses out from under the remnants of soggy snow.
There’s hope that it won’t always be this bad. Even in the hopeless moments, there’s always something else. There’s always room to joke about the absurdity of trying to find treatment that works, as she does in multiple ones detailing various attempts to find a mental health professional, or the right medication.”
“Toronto poet Myna Wallin also considers mortality as a subject in her new collection, here viewing it through the prism of mental illness. The lyrics in The Suicide Poems fall broadly into the category of confessional poetry, addressing issues surrounding bipolar disorder, suicidal ideation, and the medical establishment.
The last is arguably the most excoriating aspect of the collection. The speaker in these poems is involuntarily admitted to a psych ward, prescribed a veritable cocktail of drugs to deal with impulses toward self harm, depression, and mania, and shuffled through a series of more or less ineffective therapists. (It’s a testament to Wallin’s biting humour that one poem about shopping around for a therapist is called “Speed Dating with Professionals.”) The first line in the book references “Lithium – my saviour,” while the poem “Olanzapine” is written in the style of T.S. Eliot’s “McCavity: The Mystery Cat”:
Olanzapine, Olanzapine,
pharmaceutically stiff and strong,
you promised me peace and sleep at night –
instead my nights were long.
Wallin’s poems, written in plain language that serves to heighten the urgency of her subject matter, cover eating disorders (“Pin-up Anorexic”), insomnia (“3 a.m. Tango”), depression (“Inventory”), and shopping addiction (“Debtors Anonymous”). She retails a dream of an anorexic man shot out of a cannon “and transformed into an explosion of roses,” commenting that her psychotherapist was clearly not a Freudian because he missed the dream’s obvious phallic subtext.
This kind of mordant tone crops up frequently in the collection. In “School Project,” Wallin relates a seventh-grade assignment to build “something / from another era.” What the student in the poem constructs is miniature gallows, a decision that left her “teacher / speechless” and her “parents aghast.” In “The Terrarium,” the speaker removes a live crow from the eponymous gift provided by a friend, an act that results in a petulant response: “It’s not the same without the bird!” “In Session” involves another series of unsatisfactory therapists, known variously as “The Troll,” “The Runway Model,” and “The Freudian.”
Wallin also invokes earlier poets who had experience with mental illness. The title poem is a modified glossa that uses lines from Sylvia Plath’s “Edge” to dramatize the experience of a woman who travels to Switzerland to take her own life. “She wants to erase herself,” Wallin writes. Here, unlike elsewhere in the collection, the woman’s suicidal ideation leads to a successful self-annihilation, though the final observation – “the suicide potion / makes her gag” – provides an ironic cap to the poem. A later lyric, “Soft Second Skin,” imagines the thoughts of Anne Sexton before taking her own life; it too invokes Plath: “Did you think about Sylvia, your friend?”
The references to Plath and Sexton, two famous confessional poets each of whom suffered mental illness that eventually drove them to suicide, are contextualizing touchstones in Wallin’s own collection, locating the nexus between mental health, femininity, and the creative impulse. (“Soft Second Skin” also makes a glancing allusion to Virginia Woolf.)
Wallin’s conversational tone may seem at odds with her fraught subject matter, but it brings a rawness to the material that a more abstruse or recondite presentation might omit. The poems in The Suicide Tourist do not always make for easy reading, but they are searingly honest about the experience of mental illness and the various ways in which it is treated – or, more often, mistreated – in a society that still shies away from the subject, considering it distasteful or ugly. In lifting the veil on the realities of living with such stigma, the book provides a valuable resource for empathetic readers.”
“People are SLEEPING on Myna Wallin’s beautiful poetry collection ‘The Suicide Tourist.’ This collection dives into the visceral conversation about mental health written in a way that anyone can relate to. Truthfully, the topics of these poems are some I’ve never come across before. Wallin addresses the stigma surrounding mental illness and shares her personal experiences in an easy-to-understand way.
Two poems that blew my mind are called “The Last Resort Hotel” and “Speed Dating with Professionals.” If you need an excuse to break your book buying ban then getting this collection for these two poems alone is worth it!
“The Last Resort Hotel” guides us through a mental health facility (apologies if that is not the correct or proper term), where we experience the competing stimuli and energy that exists in that space.
“Speed Dating with Professionals” is the best description I’ve ever heard to explain the process of meeting with mental health professionals and trying to find the right fit. Anyone who has been on the journey of finding a doctor who will listen to your needs or a therapist that you click with, will align with this poem perfectly! It’s also quite funny especially if you relate to the experience.
Thank you to @river_street_writes and @mynapoet for putting this life affirming poetry collection into my hands! Special thank you to @mynapoet for writing such a beautiful note for me in the book. This was my first physical ARC (outside of working in a bookstore) and it meant more than you know.
(Note: Book Released on June 28, 2024. Review was written with final published copy)
Book Recommendation If You Enjoyed This: ‘Poetry for Thinkers and Feelers” by Melody Godfred.”
“In the fractured light of Myna Wallin’s prose, the shadows of human despair unfold like a dark bloom. ‘Suicide Tourist’ is a brave, unflinching exploration of the abyss that resides within us all – the void where hope and desperation entwine like lovers.
Wallin’s narrator, a seeker of truths and falsehoods, navigates the twilight world of suicidal ideation with an unsteady footing, as if balancing on the razor’s edge of existence. We follow, transfixed, as she probes the fissures of her own psyche, laying bare the cruel arithmetic of pain and the audacity of survival.
This is no facile tale of redemption or resolution. Instead, Wallin offers us a jagged, beautiful mosaic of fragments: memories, observations, and confessions that coalesce into a portrait of the human condition in all its fractured glory.
Her writing is a scalpel-sharp excavation of the self, stripping away artifice to reveal the pulsing, vulnerable core beneath. We are compelled to confront the abyss alongside her, and in doing so, discover the twisted beauty that lies within.
‘Suicide Tourist’ is an uncompromising, necessary work – a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the alchemy of words that can transmute darkness into light. Wallin’s prose is a benediction, a curse, and a sacrament all at once; it will leave you changed, like the aftermath of a storm that clears the air.
But what strikes me as particularly remarkable about this collection is its expansive empathy. Wallin doesn’t merely inhabit her own struggles; she also bears witness to the trials of others – the marginalized, the silenced, and the forgotten. Her poems become a mirror held up to the world, reflecting the intricate web of human suffering and resilience that binds us all. This is poetry as radical act of listening, of compassion, and of solidarity.”
“It’s a brilliant collection and well-polished with a poetic sublime sensibility of a survivor’s specific mental health challenges and gender identity as (cis)-woman. Some of the poems actually made me laugh—the identification at what mental health madness can evoke in us and others around us in specific environments such as a willful image of a lady ‘sliding through the psychiatric ward?! of a hospital with washed socks as slippers during a manic stage of germophobia.’ Bi-polar struggles, depression and manic anxiety feel human and real with narrative and strong imagery.
I felt similar responses to the desires and up swings of a woman inclined to spend, splurge, break social boundaries. Sometimes I was reminded of the book turned film (Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie 1998) by Susanna Kaysen: Girl, Interrupted. These poems ever familiar references to the internal struggle of Plath, Sexton, Woolf, at times with early Russian 20th century references that evoke imagery of Tolstoy and a culture forgot as well as the Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen and Edgar Allen Poe’s embrace of the darker moments. The matter of suicide is a powerful because it resonates with all the spinning women who are suffering with aloneness and worth that are only real to thoughts when fatigued, inevitably being hard on oneself. This is a guide, a light to understanding and experiencing one poet’s brilliance and profoundly complex inner life, emotional and psychological.”
“The Suicide Tourist by Myna Wallin is a gorgeous examination of living with mental illness,
specifically bipolar disorder.
The poems are replete with gut-twistingly beautiful lines and clarion observations. Also, with humour
and sadness. This is one of those collections I’m recommending especially to people who say they
“don’t get poetry.”
Wallin’s writing is a brilliant example of how there’s nothing you have to get. You just have to give
yourself over to it.
A beautiful book.”
“Do you ever get book mail in the morning and finish the book that afternoon? The Suicide Tourist by @mynapoet was a difficult read for me due to it touching on suicide and major mental health conditions, both of which have affected my family. At the same time, it’s an incredibly moving collection of poems that pulls on your heart strings.”
“Thank you so much to @river_street_writes and @mynapoet for sending me a copy of this lovely
poetry collection to review.
Obviously this recommendation comes with trigger warnings. I chose this title because the topic is
something that hits very close to home for me and I think it’s so important that works like this exist. I
am going to share the synopsis and also share the titles of a few of the poems that I loved most!
Synopsis:
‘A significant challenge of bipolar illness is the difficulty in making coherent decisions; one becomes
an unreliable narrator in one’s own life. In this mental health confessional, poems about depression,
mania, suicidal ideation, and the challenge of living with these disabilities are tackled with naked
honesty and deep humour.’
Some of my personal favourites:
✨Inventory
✨Mania
✨The Last Resort Hotel
✨Speed Dating with Professionals
✨Mania Calling
✨Pin-up Anorexic
Grab a copy of this one today!”
Confessions of a Reluctant Cougar
In Myna Wallin’s second book, a reluctant cougar tells all. She feasts on young men of all kinds, in a world where sex isn’t dirty but love is coated in grime. In this raucous novel, she runs the gauntlet of men, including a narcissistic art history buff, a semiotics professor, a foot fetishist, a jaded brand consultant, a homeless man, and a bisexual mime.
Wallin’s merciless wit subverts the Chick Lit genre, cleverly critiquing its man- chasing imperatives and dating cliches… It’s refreshing to read Wallin’s tone of ironic detachment from the fantasies that fuel dating-culture stereotypes and manufactured elements of desire in dating narratives such as Sex and the City.
A Thousand Profane Pieces
A Thousand Profane Pieces is a first-hand tour through the world of today’s woman, for whom desire is no longer a dirty word. With humour and intelligence, Wallin’s poems explore where the sensual woman has been and where she’s going. If Candace Bushnell wrote poetry, these are the kind of poems she would write.
Wallin’s book is exhilarating: a dollop of sugar-coated acid. It’s subtitle should be, Love and the Older, Single Woman: The persona has been hurt, has snapped back, but vows her vulnerability. The pink-and-black, lady-as Catwoman cover is just right: there’s cattiness, meowing, and hissing here. The tone? Ms. Sylvia Plath Atwood: Satire and Cynicism for the Discriminating Reader… Wallin’s wit exudes wisdom and wrath. Perfect.