“You are not you again today” opens Cynthia Hoffman’s fourth collection Exploding Head. This is a memoir written in second-person prose poems, charting the speaker’s obsessive compulsive disorder from childhood to motherhood. Hoffman sets out to make viscerally real for readers a world in which the threat of violence is both inescapable and self-perpetuating. The result is a relentless gem of a collection whose power lies in its ability to render anxiety palpable on the page. The poems interrogate the threshold between the two realities the speaker is forced to occupy — dangerous imagined scenarios kept at bay by the enactment of obsessive behaviors.
I opened this book with only a nominal understanding of OCD. I finished with a new awareness that it is a disorder of contradictions, demanding the exchange of long-term for short-term relief — “Run to bed and lie perfectly still beneath the quilt until the toilet stops flushing. Something will happen if you don’t.” This tension is alive in the book, as Hoffman compounds contradictions in dense, unflinching prose poems. This is overwhelmingly a collection about living through duality; seen perhaps most acutely in the poem “Simultaneity”:
The smallest thing sets off a spark. A cigarette careening down the highway like a tiny seagull with its tail on fire. Fire in the belly of the car. Today marks the opening of the southern portal in the sky. Geese are honking their way out of here. It is the first cool evening of the year when the car explodes. Your lap spangles with glass. Meanwhile, the lake has swallowed a cloud. The lake is slick as a skull, and you go charging deep into its watery brain. Meanwhile, your hands are on the wheel. You drive until the garage door lifts an eyelid, awakening the bright eye of home. By now, the hair of the drowned woman has wiped away her face. You carry her with you, dripping across the kitchen tiles. The water is already boiling on the stove. Your husband hands you the knife. Meanwhile, the first geese of autumn fly through the blue door.
The cigarette prompts a moment of rupture. One version of the speaker hurtles into the lake while another makes her way back home. Hoffman sculpts the threshold through criss-crossing images: “your lap spangles with glass” and “the lake is slick as a skull.” They are at once disturbing and somehow shiny, enticing. Claustrophobia is born out of a crisis of causality. The image of the cigarette sets things in motion, but then things become contorted. The geese are trapped in a loop as Hoffman renders the poem much like an Escher diagram whose exits and endings become entwined. “Geese are honking their way out of here,” she writes. At the end they return flying “through the blue door.” Entwinement finds climax in the merging of the two speakers. One version drowns, “meanwhile” another arrives home and parks in the sleepy garage. But the two cannot escape one another: “the hair of the drowned woman has wiped away her face. You carry her with you, dripping across the kitchen tiles.”
In some ways the ever-violent version of events — “the back of your head is blown open. The nurse didn’t care” — operates as an extended metaphor that bridges the speaker’s psyche with images of turmoil and destruction. But the premise of the book relies on the reader disregarding the figurative. That is the contract between reader and writer. Violent alternatives do not dissolve into a sub-realm — we carry them with us, just as the speaker carries the obdurate body through the kitchen.
Self-severance is gradual, and Hoffman controls the pace at which the disorder is made manifest. This pacing contributes to the propulsive nature of the book which, aligning with its prose elements, contains a kind of narrative arc. In childhood self-severance is subtle: “the bad part of your mind was still asleep.” Nascent signs of compulsion arise softly through negation: “crouched among ferns, you almost couldn’t feel the soft arrows pointing you out from all directions.” The term “dreamscape” is nearly fitting for the incantatory quality of the images: “Meanwhile, your sister’s swing swished and lulled, the blur of your yellow dress.” Fear will soon come to displace the speaker’s cautious albeit curious gaze. The delicate ambiguity of this poem exists to be broken with unfaltering directness in later poems, and it is contrasts like this that lend the collection its pulse: “The rules are: count the sides of the rectangles. Graves. Gravestones. The rules are: if you don’t count, you’ll die.”
This brazenness is found in the title of the poem “This is all true.” It states, “If your foot dangles off the edge of the bed, a metal blade rises from the floor and slices it off. The blade has already been installed in the floor.” Here, a familiar childhood superstition escalates into graphic, intrusive images of violence. Logic goes that lesser violence will remediate this — “look directly at the sun” “bite a hole in your cheek” “run to bed and lie perfectly still” “Press your fingers to your palm in a particular order.” Imperative verbs ignite an urgent bodily freneticism. “This could be your last day of freedom” is the poem’s operative line. The irony being that maintaining any notion of so-called freedom requires the relinquishing of such. And that is where the second-person address is so striking. Hoffman capitalizes on the hybridity of the prose-poem form to contain the multiplicity of her “you” (the pronoun varyingly encompasses the reader, the speaker, and the disorder), revealing a propulsive world in which agency is severely compromised. The relentless “you” essentially works to encapsulate all and any possibility.
So, specific acts performed in “particular order” dictate the speaker’s life. Without wanting to fuse form and content together too forcefully, poetry as a form has its own relationship to order and compulsion. I’m thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous definition of prose as “words in their best order,” and poetry as “the best words in the best order.” These definitions seem resonant for a collection deeply concerned with the line between prose and poetry as well as with the order and arrangement of things in the world. If poetry is the impulse towards the perfect arrangement, many of Hoffman’s poems describe the urge towards the perceived safest arrangement.
But these ideas regarding “arrangement” led me to question the form. Why prose poems? On the one hand, the regimented boxiness of the prose poem is suitably claustrophobic and mirrors the rectangle motif that ripples through the collection — “count all the sides of the rectangles.” The prosaic form similarly compliments the memoir which unfolds with diarist progression and accommodates the overall narrative. At the same time, when first encountering the text, I was surprised by the form, and wondered briefly why lineation — which in free verse is a primary way to control pause, tension, emphasis, all of which complement Hoffman’s concerns re pattern, order, hierarchy — had been rejected.
But this book shows prose poems at their best, existing to accommodate an entirely new kind of muscular density. Lineation is a way of guiding breath (I think of Charles Olsen, who wrote “the line, I swear it, comes from the breath”), but Hoffman’s poems eliminate the breath entirely. In one poem, Hoffman lists “protection spells.” She includes “the breath of air when you were no longer drowning. The first breath after choking and the sweet chocolate melted in your throat.” The disorder threatens life — in a simple sense, it threatens breathing. 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.
In the introduction to The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Jeremy Noel Tod writes, “How, then, to define the prose poem? After reading so many, I can only offer the simplest common denominator: a prose poem is a poem without line breaks.” I love this definition, and its simplicity made me wonder whether eliminating lineation in a poem makes room for breaks of other kinds. Breaks in the more figurative sense abound in Hoffman’s collection — split realities, split speakers, split forms brushing up against one another.
If the poem “Simultaneity” were to have a foil, it might be the “A Great Many Things,” which is the collection’s penultimate poem and can be seen as the manifestation of yet another “break.” We have by this point experienced the sustained proliferation of threat. “A Great Many Things,” in some ways, represents the regaining of control which, ironically, comes from relinquishing it. This is not to say the collection delivers a tidy closure, but here language becomes gentle, observant, attentive to the natural world: “at dusk, walking through the field, you picked a feather from the grass and ran its shimmering vane between your knuckles. […] You saw how easily the delicate design of the world can be undone. But for now you are safe in this watery embrace.” And not only safe, but the speaker is whole; “your body and all its invisible particles stitched tightly together.”
Hoffman is disinterested in portraying a universal experience of obsessive compulsive disorder — the term itself appears only in a blurb. Instead, Exploding Head is a rich and sensory depiction of a life experienced beyond and outside of diagnosis, entrenched in personal experience.
Hoffman ends “A Great Many Things” with the words “a great many things will happen to you, but none of the things you are afraid of. It was the wind in your hair. The red-winged birds embroidering the blue sky.” Then, in a moment of understated acceptance, “That has been your life” — whole and unbroken.
[Published by Persea Books on February 6 2024, 76 pages, $15.95, paperback]