Sign Language for the Death of Reason tries to make sense of a post-traumatic life in poems that are mesmerising in their beauty and stark truthfulness. Sign Language is Linda Collins’s poetic response to her memoir, Loss Adjustment, about the death by suicide of her daughter, Victoria. Set in a dreamy state of irrationality and unreality, where nothing is certain and yet, hope of certainty persists, a narrator who could be Collins, and a persona who could be Victoria, explore loss and love, from the longing arising from bereavement or loss of identity, to sexual yearning, and survivor grief. Along the way, two women evolve in their relationships, though one is dead, or is she? If the self is a construct of history, who is this spectral creature haunting the living? My heart is calm, beats slowly. All life’s doing is done. Birds are at eye level. How easy it would seem to fly a while with them. Then descend. Did you imagine leaf-tipped bark arms reaching to carry you to the next world?
Author
Linda Collins has a new book out (April, 2021), a poetry collection called Sign Language for the Death of Reason, edited by Lambda shortlister Tania De Rozario. It is published by Math Paper Press who sell it through their online bookstore @booksactually. In New Zealand, the distributor is bayhillbooks.co.nz. Linda is doing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She already has one MA in Creative Writing, during which she wrote her best-selling memoir, Loss Adjustment. That MA was with the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) at Victoria University, New Zealand, 2017. Her creative non-fiction, essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in Turbine, Swamp Living, The Fib Review, The Cordite Poetry Review, Oyster River Pages, Literary Mama, Fan the Flames (UEA Eggbox zine), and The Freerange Journal. She was shortlisted for the Hachette Australia Trans-Tasman mentorship, longlisted for a NZ flash fiction award and received an Honourable Mention in a Glimmer Train contest. Loss Adjustment was written three years after her daughter had died, and is a work of creative non-fiction. In fiction, she has short stories in A View of Stars: Stories of Love (Marshall-Cavdendish) and Call and Response 2 (Math Paper Press).
