Exploding Head

“Try not counting these five ducks: nobody gets it. Nobody gets it. Go home. Spring is chronic. The mind is chronic.” Counting, repeating, managing intrusive thoughts—Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s dazzling fourth collection, Exploding Head, cracks open life with obsessive-compulsive disorder through second-person prose poems that follow “a haunted girl, haunted of mind.”

Exploding Head begins with the speaker as a small child, when the “bad part of your mind was still asleep,” and charts the child’s attempts to manage her mind as the world turns terrifying. “The Face Has Seven Holes” begins:

Someone is talking to you. Look at her face when she’s talking to you. Draw a star. Start with the right nostril. Draw a line to the left ear, up to the right eye, down to the mouth, left eye, right ear, left nostril. The face has seven holes. Blink on it. Seven blinks.

“This Is All True” tracks the horrors of intrusive thoughts:

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. How do you know you haven’t murdered someone accidentally? Look directly at the sun. Touch your eyeball once a day. Bite a hole in your cheek. […] Something will happen if you don’t.

We follow the speaker through young adulthood and into motherhood, as the book’s concluding poems explore the particular challenges of parenting with OCD:

Children are sucked into the night. A gasp opens in the wall. You wake and drag the curtains from the wind. Your child sleeps, but it doesn’t matter. Enormous moths sail in and smother children in their sleep.

In “Transference,” we observe the speaker trying to let go: “Night by night, you are learning to leave her bared. She is not you. You believe in this new child come into the world despite you, entirely herself.”

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.