Rainy Day Healing

Many people use poetry as a healer. Victoria Lambinicio’s 2024 book is an example of poetry as a healer.

Midnight in Asia is a collection of poetry in six chapters, written as the author states, by a “schizophrenic Asian American woman.” Throughout the collection of verses, her theme is about travelling to Asia “for a breath of rejuvenation.” She wants to find wisdom and advice before returning to America, where she was born, to rebuild her life “from the ground up.”

The aim of this poetry collection is “to have glimmers of hope that writing poetry will enable me to escape this troubled time with my life and dreams intact.”

The author writes autobiographical poetry “in the midst of this chaos” at the age of thirty-four – away from “the blur” of going to therapy, attending medical appointments, and getting medicine for her schizophrenia that she has had since the age of nineteen. She says of this form of expression: “poetry never asks a writer for their past, only what the writer can do with a pen and paper.”

She begins optimistically with a poem called Towards a New Destiny – she is seeking a new life, “one that I would love to live.” She puts into verse her episodic paranoid events, the shame of them, and her transition to writing poetry as a way out, a way forward, to this new destiny.

In the chapter “I offer my real name” she writes poems of her confusion identifying a culture she could belong to – trying to fit into the American culture while growing up in an Asian household. In the chapter “I offer my secret love” she tells of relationships and “for love to save me” – for love to make her happy – and reveals the realities. She writes of a friend in “sisterhood” going through adolescence, of Asian-Americanness, and of commencing therapy.

In the final chapter “Endings” and the poem From Beyond Midnight, the author writes of the hope that poetry brings her to the destiny that traditional therapy hasn’t been able to for her. She describes how her mental darkness comes quickly but that, from within darkness, there is a way forward.

This collection of poetry and prose is raw, unfiltered, poignant, and insightful, yet structured, ordered, and linear. It describes her transition from traditional life and medicine to the free-form flow of writing as a soother, a release, and a revelation.

Making my peace with poetry as a healer; I will do the following:

• Read more poetry
• Read poetry aloud
• Take comfort in poetry as a soother
• Find revelations in the poetry I read
• Explore my own creative spirit

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