The Suicide Tourist by Myna Wallin

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 make 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.

The Suicide Tourist is a beautiful poetry collection, agonizing and hopeful. It’s worth your time, and more than worth your time to sit with Wallin’s verses, and hold space for the sheer honesty of them.

Read an essay from Myna Wallin on Psychiatry Then and Now on our Patreon.

Myna Wallin got her MA in English from the University of Toronto and is the author of A Thousand Profane Pieces and Confessions of a Reluctant Cougar (Tightrope Books, 2006 and 2010 respectively), as well as Anatomy of An Injury (Inanna Publications, 2018). She has a beautiful senior cat named Star, and at last count twenty-seven thriving houseplants.

Publisher: Ekstasis Editions (June 28, 2024)
Paperback 6″ x 9″ | 95 pages
ISBN: 978-1-77171-546-1

Alison Manley

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Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.