About Cynthia

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of the OCD memoir in prose poems, Exploding Head (2024), as well as three previous collections of poetry: Sightseer, Paper Doll Fetus, and Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones.

Essays in The Sun, TIME, and Lit Hub.

Poems in Electric Literature, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review, Poetry Daily, and The Slowdown.

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Selected Books

Exploding Head

Call Me When You Want to Talk About the Tombstones

Paper Doll Fetus

Sightseer

“A riveting collection that pulls us into the inner clamor of a woman with OCD. …so frightfully alive that I felt I’d been transported into another woman’s extraordinary brain.”
Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca
“My Pinterest board filled up with surreal images of women whose heads were dissolving into blurs, streaks of color as if the wind had swept their thoughts away in a tangle of threads, or the tops of their skulls entirely disappeared. These images depicted how I felt when OCD ran off with my thoughts, what OCD has taken away.”
Electric Literature
“Hoffman masterfully thins the veil between worlds, allowing the reader a glimpse into the workings of a distinctive mind. The result is a magnificently propulsive and evocative collection.”
Rebecca Morgan Frank, Poetry Foundation