The Door at the End of Everything

Written while Lynda Monahan was hospital writer-in-residence at the Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert, working often on the adult and youth mental health wards, the tight, pared poems in The Door at the End of Everything give voice to and honour those living with mental illness, speaking to not only the suffering but also the courage and hope that is so clearly there as well.

Several of the poems and poetry sequences have seen publication in various literary journals, including Grain, The Society, The New Quarterly, Transition, Bareback, and Dalhousie Review, and in the poetry anthologies Writing Menopause (Inanna Publications), Lummox Anthology of Canadian Poetry, Worth More Standing (Caitlin Press), the Apart pandemic anthology (Saskatchewan Writers Guild), and Line Dance (Burton House Books), and in various tanka publications such as Atlas Poetica, A Hundred Gourds, and Gusts. A series of online readings from this collection, created with the help of a Canada Council grant, are available on YouTube.

Reviews

“This is a terrific poetry collection. The poems are presented in a variety of styles, but always with a light, lyrical touch, notwithstanding the seriousness of the content of many of them: the poems explore mental illness, not in a clinical way, but from the inside, as well as aging, grief, loneliness, and loss. Despite the grim subject matter, the poems are infused with lovely imagery and a sense of hope . . . filled with vivid, arresting images and well-turned lines, coloured by shades of darkness and light.” – Dave Margoshes