Land of Stone: Breaking Silence Through Poetry (William Beaumont Hospital Speech and Language Pathology Series) (William Beaumont Hospital Speech and ... Series in Speech and Language Pathology)

For more than a decade, Karen Chase taught poetry writing to severely incapacitated patients at a large psychiatric hospital outside of New York City. During that time, she began working with Ben, a handsome, formerly popular and athletic young man who had given up speaking and had withdrawn from social interaction. Meeting on the locked ward every week for two years, Chase and Ben passed a pad of paper back and forth, taking turns writing one line of poetry each, ultimately producing 180 poems that responded to, diverged from, and built on each other s words. Land of Stone is Chase s account of writing with Ben, an experience that was deeply transformative for both poet and patient.