The Patients All Seemed Happy by Lianne O'Hara Arachne Press immigrant anxieties: these poems look

immigrant anxieties: these poems look inward

The poet intertwines Ireland's colonial history with an examination of how the crises of mental health and housing affect those in domestic spaces

yet ambitiously experimental among the forms she uses

a place where ordinary things are transfigured into treasures - a red ribbon

It’s 2022 – and in the intensity of their dark light

The Patients All Seemed Happy by Lianne O'Hara Arachne Press immigrant anxieties: these poems lookGrangegorman Dublin's oldest psychiatric institution operated from 1814 to 2013, becoming a centerpiece of Ireland's troubling legacy of mass institutionalisation. By the 1970s, the country housed more people in mental hospitals per capita than anywhere else in the world. Beyond those with mental illness, Grangegorman became home to society's unwanted: people with intellectual disabilities, alcohol problems, and those who simply found no way to fit