Exploding Head
An OCD Memoir in Prose Poems
‘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
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
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
[Exploding Head] whirls with motifs of skulls, fires, angels, guns, stars, ghosts, and numbers. … [Hoffman’s] work is simultaneously morbid and marvelous, observing mortality, motherhood, and obsession, while singing through the pain to reach at understanding. Each prose poem is a language container compressed so tightly it’s ready to detonate.
Simone Muench, Sunday Reading Series
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
When I read Exploding Head for the first time, I was walking on the treadmill and reading while taking notes. It was the perfect reading experience for me because the collection had me in tizzy. Hoffman is in the pocket of her interior, so gutsy, so needle-prickling, reading the poems is like discovering a rash traveling up your arm. I can say with full confidence, it’s the best book I’ve read on the manifestation of spiraling (as in anxiety) on the page. It is a story of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Cassie Mannes Murray, Pine State: The Newsletter
Exploding Head is a rich and sensory depiction of a life experienced beyond and outside of diagnosis, entrenched in personal experience. … this book shows prose poems at their best, existing to accommodate an entirely new kind of muscular density. … Hoffman’s poems are best read in sequence. This way, the breath is forced to accumulate uncomfortably, to tremble inside each poem without release. The directions opened by the possibility of line break would liberate the poems too much. Instead the boxy form becomes something of the horse’s bit keeping tension in each poem tight.
Imogen Osborne, On the Seawall