Exploding Head
An OCD Memoir in Prose Poems
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.
Magnificently propulsive and evocative.
Rebecca Morgan Frank, Poetry Foundation
Eerie and beautiful, through and through.
Summer Farrah, The Millions
I want someone to make a haunted house of these poems.
Megan Wildhood, New Books Network
‘Right at this moment, an airplane is crashing through the roof,’ Cynthia Marie Hoffman writes in Exploding Head, a riveting collection that pulls us into the inner clamor of a woman with OCD. 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
lush, urgent, unsettling. Breathless, gorgeous and achy. Although the poems stand alone as works of art, together they also afford readers a unique glimpse of what it’s like to live with this often misunderstood, misdescribed OCD condition.
Maggie Ginsberg, Madison Magazine
It makes sense that Hoffman chose the prose poem as her medium. The anxiety and pressure engendered by the next intrusive thought seems always to be building at the cloistered margins of unrelieved text.
Benjamin Landry, VerseCurious