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.
Dawn McGuire is a neurologist and author of four poetry collections, Sleeping in Africa, Hands On, The Aphasia Cafe and American Dream with Exit Wound. She grew up in Eastern Kentucky and was educated at Princeton University, Union Theological Seminary, and Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. Her scientific work is focused in two areas: developing biological and gene therapies for diseases such as Huntington's disease and Multiple Sclerosis; and in reducing disparities in stroke and other neurologic conditions. Her poems have appeared in various literary magazine and anthologies, including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the Journal of American Neurology. McGuire has won several poetry awards, including winner of the 2013 Indie Book Award for Poetry, the Troubadour Prize (UK), the National League of American Pen Women, and the 2011 Sarah Lawrence/Campbell Corner Academy of Language Exchange Poetry Prize for "poems that treat larger themes with lyric intensity." She is Adjunct Professor of Neurology at the Neurosciences Institute of Morehouse School of Medicine, and divides her time between Atlanta and Northern California.
"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 supercharged 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, California Poet Laureate (2008-2011)
"It's taken almost five hundred years for science to awaken from its post-Cartesian love affair with rationality, and reacknowledge what the Greeks knew: the gods are an unruly lot. They live in us; 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, Author of Vernal Pool