American Dream with Exit Wound by Dawn Mcguire

American Dream with Exit Wound by Dawn Mcguire

Poetry. In this new collection by the award-winning poet and neurologist Dawn McGuire, the American Dream is an ironic construct at the end of Empire. Here, returning soldiers bring hazardous materials home in their bodies and minds; while home is increasingly a battleground of addiction and disaffection. In Limbics, the book's middle section, the neurological old brain speaks. Jealousy, rage, and anxious intuition overwhelm all reason; while desire is that resistless force by which we are first made / inflamed, destroyed / then raised to aerial ash / again and again. In Ghosts, the final section, inevitable losses of love, will, memory, and capacity become the psyche's missing children. They haunt us, and sometimes steal our names.These poems confront deeper wounds in body, mind, and body politic, wounds that science can neither name nor remedy. There is strong medicine here, transgressive and redemptive.

McGuire's poems intercept the reader in an 'emergency room' of language, then roll in the crash cart, starting with this heart-shock title: AMERICAN DREAM WITH EXIT WOUND. McGuire is inspired by her work with post 9/11 vets, by her brain research as a neurologist and her immersion in myth. You will take your life in your hands as you read these super-charged poems-and you will...'come to' with an exit wound: by which I mean to say a whole new consciousness of what poetry is, what poetry can do, and how poetry urgently matters.--Carol Muske-Dukes

It's taken almost five hundred years for science to awaken from its post- Cartesian love affair with rationality, and re-acknowledge what the Greeks knew: the gods are an unruly lot. Their Olympus is the untamable, amoral, 'limbic' core from which our most base and most exalted passions arise. McGuire, both a neuroscientist and a classics-infused poet, lights up the limbic brain, then makes it sing like a drunken Caruso.--David Shaddock

McGuire, Dawn: - Dawn McGuire is a neurologist and author of three poetry collections, including AMERICAN DREAM WITH EXIT WOUND (IF SF Publishing, 2017) and THE APHASIA CAFü¾Ž–Œ¼ (IF SF Publishing, 2012), winner of the 2013 Indie Book Award for Poetry. She grew up in the Appalachian region of Kentucky and was educated at Princeton University, Union Theological Seminary, and Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. She lives and works in Northern California.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780985977375
ISBN 10	098597737X
Title	American Dream with Exit Wound
Author	Dawn Mcguire
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	If SF Publishing
Year published	2017-04-15
Number of pages	80
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.