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Exploding Head
Poems by Cynthia Marie Hoffman

Available Now

This collection of prose poems chronicles a woman’s childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world.

“Hoffman’s fourth book compresses the relentlessness of fear and obsession into electrifying prose poems, boxes threatening to burst. Hoffman scrutinizes the child self and the mother self with absorbing candor, precision, music, and urgency in this harrowing world where ‘birds bomb through the air like the skulls of galloping horses.’ The impulses that sprint through the mind—‘a shuddering animal hunkered down inside your skull’—come so frightfully alive that I felt I’d been transported into another woman’s extraordinary brain.”—Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four books, including Call Me When You Want To Talk About the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, and one chapbook of poetry. Her poems have also been published widely in journals and magazines, including The Believer, Diode, Image, The Missouri Review, and many others. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Original Trade Paperback / $15.95 (Can. $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-577-2 / 88 pages / Poetry