Yellow Butterfly: A Creative Talent's Struggle with Mental Illness

Yellow Butterfly showcases not only the budding poetic and visual talents of a promising young artist, but it also chronicles her struggles with increasingly debilitating episodes of psychosis as she attempted to negotiate high school, college, and young adulthood. The potential of her creative voice, easily seen in her earliest work, becomes even more apparent in her later poems. Like a shore bird's tracks in the sand, her sparse but keen use of language reveals an authenticity of style and a sense of how far she may have gone on her poetic journey. Confessional at times, Dorie Reichert does not use these revelations to shock us but to help us begin to unpack her experience. Knowing all too well how the world outside of her illness misconceives the landscape she navigated, her poetry offers us a way inside of it by using direct and honest imagery.