Lock Her Up

Tina Parker

In Lock Her Up, Tina Parker gives voice to the women from the not too distant past who were not allowed to make decisions about their own bodies and mental health. In this thought-provoking collection, Parker brings to life three characters and highlights their stories through poems and research. We grow in care and concern about Mattie M. Roberts, Rachel Wells and Emma Darby and are able to relate to their struggles and circumstances. Lock Her Up is a deeply moving book and Accents Publishing is proud to bring it to you.

What Others Say About Lock Her Up

Tina Parker's haunting new collection Lock Her Up is a tribute, a beautifully rendered defense of women who throughout the late 1800s and mid-1900s were admitted into the Southwestern Lunatic Asylum in Virginia. It is an examination of the platitudes, misdiagnoses and treatments administered to women who needed succor not restraint, understanding not punishment; women who had been set aside by their families or bored husbands, were abused, widowed or their children dead or taken from them. This poet has done her research. "The day they came for me / I cartwheeled into the sea / And sang open the snow." Reader, you will wince, you will curse, you will weep.

—Kari Gunter-Seymour

Tina Parker's brief, imagistic poems work like chants to conjure the women in this remarkable collection. These fragmented and compressed poems perfectly represent the imagined lives of women institutionalized in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries in a "lunatic asylum" near the poet's homeplace. And yet, these poems are timeless; from the hateful, recent political mantra of the collection's title to the (mostly) unchanging position of women in a patriarchal society, these poems speak to contemporary audiences about the suppression of women's voices. With regularity we are still dismissed, spit upon, raped, and "shushed;" and if we carry "extended grief of losing children" or rebel against traditional gender roles or express "hatred / of marriage / and religion," we are still labeled "High strung," "unsettled," flaunting "hysteria." Parker's haunting poems unlock and venerate our foremothers who were "right troublesome and at times excited" so that we can all be reminded: "See I am here / Please tell them / I was here."

—Marianne Worthington

Pleas for Admission

Will you take my mother
          She is widowed, violent, vulgar, she eats too much and chaws
          tobacco
Will you take my daughter
          She is wild, incoherent, frolicsome, and restless
Will you take my wife
          She is lazy, obstinate, indisposed, and takes no interest in her
          home

Will you take my wife
          She complains a great deal, but most of her suffering is imaginary
Will you take my daughter
          She is a constant aberration
Will you take my mother
          She has done nothing for the past 10 or 15 years but sit and
          deplore her condition.

Details and Ordering

Publication Date: March 31, 2021
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-936628-65-0
Price: $16.00

About the Author

Tina Parker is the author of two previous poetry collections, Mother May I and Another Offering. Her current work springs from historical research into the lives of women labeled as "other"—whether that be witch, insane, or hysterical. The poems in Lock Her Up stem from 19^th and 20^th century patient records of Southwestern Lunatic Asylum in Marion, Virginia. Tina grew up in nearby Bristol, Virginia, and now lives in Berea, Kentucky. To learn more about her work, visit www.tina-parker.org, or follow her on Instagram @tetched_poet.