Böcker av Cynthia Marie Hoffman

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. Cynthia Marie Hoffman's unsettling, image-rich poems chart the interior landscape of the obsessive mind. Along with an angel who haunts the poems' speaker throughout her life, she navigates her fear of guns and accidents, fears for the safety of her child, and reckons with her own mortality, ultimately finding a path toward peace.

In thisbook-length poetry sequence, a mother inherits a leather box that was hergrandmother's. Her daughter joins her on a reconstruction of family history.Together they traipse through graveyards and sift through endless photos andclippings, piecing together what used to be in order to understand who theyare.

These visceral, mystical poems give voice to the phantom and the embryonic (homunculi, ectopic twins, fleeced lambskin) and to those who create them, biologically or otherwise. Part spell-book, part anatomical primer, Paper Doll Fetus surveys the landscape of the womb and offers us a haunting chorus of its denizens.