Madelaine Caritas Longman’s poetry has been published in literary journals such as Room, Lemon Hound, Prism, filling Station, Acorn, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and The Heron’s Nest. Her first book, The Danger Model, was released in 2019 by McGill-Queen’s University Press. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University.
Soma Mei Sheng Frazier describes her poem “Insomnia” as “an incantation evoking our potency and expansiveness; the myriad ways in which we can heal or harm ourselves. It advises, ‘When you check use reflection, use the window. A sheet / of glass and silver won’t show you as you are.’ It translates the language of birds; draws a line between the reader and an abyss of hopelessness and paranoia. And like insomnia itself, it floods us with images that are not explicitly present: children drawing birds by tracing their own outspread hands, a world demanding too much from every one of us, the waves and flashes of light that sometimes assail our eyes.”
“These immersive, polyphonic poems document a self that doubts whether it is one. Though they are hard to live inside, I keep returning to them, exhilarated at the alchemy that transforms anguish into art. With a courage born of necessity and an urgent, searing beauty, Longman words the unwordable.” Stephanie Bolster, author of A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth and White Stone
“The Danger Model forges a poetics of living inquiry. With a focused and curious gaze, Longman examines how language stretches emotional and physical realities and interrogates the fraught alchemy of existence. These poems shimmer with their own iridescent strength and vulnerability.” Adèle Barclay, author of If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You and Renaissance Normcore
“‘At what point does a thought / become an illness,’ infecting lover, self, and God with ghost-adversaries? It’s Longman’s meditation on this body of truth, ‘letting in both birdsong / and rot,’ that bears witness to one of the most epic poems of self-healing fidelity, in the face of paralyzing self-harm, I have ever read.” Weyman Chan, author of Noise from the Laundry and Human Tissue
“The Danger Model is layered in perspective and vision, image and symbol, stillness and movement, light and darkness. Longman brings the modality of polarity into one pinpoint, shattering all convention at the same time. This work seems to breathe – has a life of its own – and is written by a brilliant new voice who embodies the thinking of ‘the new way of being and seeing’ with the soul of an ancient sage. You will see moments of your own life in these pages.” Sheri-D Wilson, author of The Book of Sensations and Re:Zoom
