We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders

A collection of poems written over the course of twenty-five years as the author struggled to live with a devastating mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia. The poems bear witness to the innumerable ways a life can go off course from the inside out – from the small disasters of everyday life, to the devastation of suicide. Schizophrenia is a frightening disease, a psychiatric illness that lies for most people in an uncharted wilderness.

Comments from the poet’s psychiatrist provide a fascinating counter-point to the poems themselves – a kind of dialogue between poet and doctor that seems to mirror the therapeutic one. Readers follow Pamela Spiro Wagner’s journey, taking a personal tour through madness and back again.

Artist, poet, co-author of Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and their Journey through Schizophrenia (St Martins Press, 2005) and author of We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders (CavanKerry Press, 2009). Her third book, poems and original art, Learning to See in Three Dimensions (Green Writers Press, 2017) is now also available from Amazon and other booksellers. Visit http://phoebesparrowwagner.com for Wagner’s poetry.

These poems are the work of a first-rate writer, one who has sounded the well of her own suffering to retrieve the wherewithal to transform pain into the most powerful and moving literature.
— Richard Selzer, Surgeon and Author

Pam Wagner has an exquisite voice that is quite marvelous. With precise language, and using memories from childhood and her struggle as a diagnosed “mentally ill” woman, she provides a strong and effective mirror to herself and the rest of the world.
— Leonard Cirino, Pygmy Forest Press

February 2009
125 pp
Trade paper – 6 x 9.5
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-10-5
LaurelBooks