Postcards from Autism in Bloomington, MN

This collection beautifully describes the years Eileen Coughlin and her adopted, autistic daughter had together into early adulthood. Parents of other adopted children wondered about the probability of success of what they deemed an imperfect parental pairing. Yet Coughlin writes, "But oh, the miracle of this match." In this marvelous collection, she imparts to the reader a challenging yet loving life. It is not to be missed!
-
Mary Anna Scenga Kruch
for
The Awakenings Review
From beginning to end,
Postcards from Autism
has me under its spell. Eileen Coughlin's poems are full of wisdom, wit and lyricism. They document the poet's adoption of a baby in Jiujiang, China, and the life-affirming love that grows between mother and daughter. There are typical struggles, but beyond that, we enter the girl's autistic world, a world of haunting beauty and paralyzing fear. Coughlin tells us, "This devotion has no room for the depth / of despair, only determination." Interspersed among more traditional poems are the "postcards" from vacation spots. They highlight the disparities between the daughter's enhanced sensitivity and the mother's more "normal" or traditional response to the world. Not only is this a courageous book, it is finely-tuned poetry from a skilled storyteller.
Linda Neal
, author of
Dodge and Burn
and
Not About Dinosaurs
Eileen Coughlin's
reveals the power and patterns, the missteps and misgivings, the love and the loneliness at the heart of a mother-daughter relationship. Through poems as filled with grief as joy, this collection moves through all that time brings between two people bound up by family, raising questions of who saves whom, who needs saving, what obligations does motherhood bring, and how can we-any of us!-stand the test of those obligations. Coughlin is adept at changing registers, from funny to serious, dark to light, formal to informal. This is a beautiful and challenging book, a travelogue of the heart.
Scott Korb
, Director, MFA in Writing, Pacific University