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The
Pest Maiden: A Story of Lobotomy, Poems by Penelope Scambly Schott
The Pest Maiden: A Story
of Lobotomy by Penelope Scambly Schott is a harrowing book-length
narrative about a woman’s experience with mental illness and its
inhumane treatment through lobotomy. Combining lyric recollection and
chilling, documentary realism, the poems become a chorus of voices
speaking against a dark period of twentieth-century medicine.
Sample Poems by Penelope Schott
“Haunting, fast paced and written with a finely tuned ear for the
obsessive language of her subject, Schott tells of a family member’s
steep decline into the limbo of mental institutions. Enlivened with a
mix of letters, reports and multi-cultural references to madness, her
work is also a powerful indictment of lobotomy, a surgical plague that
swept this country at mid-twentieth century. The book deserves a wide
audience.”—Colette Inez
“Penelope Scambly Schott fuses both the mundane and the visionary,
the physiological and the spiritual. Her poems plumbing the world of madness—the
beating heart of the book—are fearlessly, flawlessly done. An American
Indian story-teller once said, ‘Stories are our escorts.’
This whole sequence of poems creates a story that both sears and moves
the reader, carrying us through an experience that we might otherwise
be unable to bear. Pest Maiden
is a stunning poetic achievement.”—Kathryn Stripling Byer
“Penelope Scambly Schott’s The
Pest Maiden approaches a dark topic and examines it with clinical
accuracy and astounding grace. It is a beautiful, moving work that peers
into the soul, communicates with the heart, and brings a lump to the throat.”—Christine
Johnson, webmaster, www.psychosurgery.org
“Having practiced neurology for 30 years, I have been around long
enough to have seen many treatment modalities touted as safe and effective,
only later to be ineffective and harmful. One wonders whether 50 years
from now our current practices will be considered barbaric and primitive.…
I can see that I should start reading more poetry and fewer neurology
journals.”—Reed C. Wilson, M.D.
Penelope Scambly Schott, a long-time New Jersey poet, now lives
in Portland, Oregon, returning for Cool Women readings. She is known for
an acclaimed novel, three poetry chapbooks, and her full-length collection,
The Perfect Mother. Her book-length narrative poem, Penelope: The Story of the Half-Scalped Woman
was granted broad critical acclaim. She has received four NJSCA
poetry fellowships, and has received a senior fellowship at the Fine Arts
Work Center and a Dodge Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center.
Her chapbook, Almost Learning to Live
in This World, was published by Pudding House Press.
ISBN 1932339477, 132 pages
Also by Penelope Scambly Schott:
A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Troubles the Commonwealth