A Review of Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s Exploding Head

Searing, breathtaking, capacious and ruthless, Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s Exploding Head is an OCD memoir that traces the life of a speaker who readers first meet in childhood and follow into adulthood and motherhood. Written in the second person, all of the poems are prose poems—a form that poet and critic Ian Seed contends can quickly shift readers’ perspectives “on a situation, object, or psychological state … within the space of a small paragraph in a manner which forces us to suspend our belief in the reality we thought we knew.” Thus, Hoffman suspends and complicates our understanding of OCD. Intrusive thoughts, fear of death, guilt, and the speaker’s “chronic” mind are some of the collection’s recurrent themes.

As Hoffman’s title suggests, the speaker’s mind—or Exploding Head—becomes a central figure, depicted through different metaphors. “In the Forest,” for example, characterizes the girl as “haunted … haunted of mind.” Here, the mind is ghost-like, elusive, and inescapable. This depiction is corroborated later in the poem “Spoiler,” which begins, “You’ve already seen your future and there’s nothing in it but your own mind.” The speaker’s reality looms inescapable before her. Alternating between the word “mind” and the more medical term “brain,” Hoffman reminds readers that OCD is both a diagnosis and a lived experience.

In depicting OCD as a lived experience, Hoffman uses landscapes to mirror the speaker’s psychological state. The first poem in the collection begins, “Somewhere off the road, a fire burns, and you are not you again today.” Fire suggests danger and unpredictability, reflecting the speaker’s own unease. A few sentences later, the poem alters this imagery: “You are not you again today, having tied the smoke around your throat like a scarf. You wear it at night as you sleep.” While the image of a scarf is delicate, the smoke around the girl’s neck is violent. In this moment, as in much of Exploding Head, Hoffman creates a striking tension between delicateness and danger, beauty and violence. These tensions are apparent in another poem when the speaker’s brain becomes likened to soil: “May the seed in your brain never become anything.” The vagueness of the word “anything” is unsettling; a seed can be hopeful and dangerous depending on what sprouts from it.

In using landscapes and elements of nature to reflect the speaker’s interiority, Hoffman “explodes” our preconceptions of subjectivity, diagnosis, and personal history. OCD is not just one thing or one experience; it is much more complicated than that. The speaker’s mind rattles and is a place where “horses spook and run.” A capacious, dynamic, and obsessed mind emerges through these pages. Through the prose poem structure, Hoffman shows the collisions occurring within the speaker’s mind, which is especially evident in “Quality of Life”:

Part of the problem is that you were in a horrific accident on
your way here, and you are already dead. Your body disrobes.
The skins of your hands float freely in the marsh, starfish among
the cattails. But would you say your quality of life is affected?
You’ve left a dozen bodies behind just today.

This opening scene begins in medias res and suspends both time and place. By beginning with an accident without any clarifying information, the poem immediately becomes disorienting. These lines move quickly through different spaces—through the private space of the home (via the word “disrobes”) to a marsh, and back to the accident. Like the speaker’s mind, the poem charges on, hurling towards an unidentified kitchen to a bathtub to a car “sunken … just below the overpass.” There are only three contextual clues that suggest that the whole scene unfolds in a therapist’s office: the title and the related question about the speaker’s quality of life (something a therapist might ask), and a reference to “this chair” (the place where a patient might sit).  Rooted only partially in one place, the poem—like the speaker’s mind—wanders. And in this wandering, her quality of life is shaped by terrifying what-ifs.

It is not just the speaker’s quality of life that’s affected, but her sense of time. While “Quality of Life” mentions a “today,” the speaker is “already dead” as she contemplates other kinds of accidents. The poem ends with another temporal marker: “Right at this moment an airplane is crashing through the roof.” As it enacts different collisions of thoughts and fears, the poem shows how OCD is defined by simultaneity and frightful possibilities. Rather than prioritizing one narrative, Hoffman shows how an anxious mind can hold multiple outcomes at once. 

Exploding Head is ever shifting and kaleidoscopic … With a keen poetic eye, Hoffman infuses the everyday with marvel.

While some poems use metaphor and external environments to capture the speaker’s struggles, others depict her obsessions and compulsions more directly. Many poems, for example, address the speaker’s compulsion to count to fend off harm. In “Its Starts,” when the speaker is only a child, counting becomes a form of reassurance: “Everything is all right. The pattern of your counting makes a 4.” And later, “Counting” ends, “Often, come morning, you wake counting the lobbing paces of your heart. Have you done this all night in your sleep? There is a sort of grace in it, after all, counting yourself lucky to be alive.” By counting, the speaker wards off her sense of guilt, fear of death, and fear of hurting others.

Exploding Head is ever shifting and kaleidoscopic. Hoffman reveals OCD as not just one experience. To riff on Seed’s assertion, she asks us “to suspend our belief in the reality we thought we knew.” In so doing, Hoffman shows us a sensual, delicate world full of beauty. With a keen poetic eye, Hoffman infuses the everyday with marvel as “Snow Angel” exhibits: “Angel of the last spoon of peanut butter in the jar. Angel of the rough bottom of the pool.” Elsewhere, Hoffman zooms in on “a galaxy of bubbles” and shows readers how “napkins swept in an updraft [look] like hands lifted to prayer.” Exploding Head is a life-affirming, richly textured collection defined by multiplicity. These dynamics are showcased in the last poem, “Shells,” which describes the speaker on a beach with her daughter. Together, they press their ears up to shells to see what they can hear. To her daughter, the speaker says: “The song in your hands is quiet, but today you can hear the tiniest of voices.” Hoffman might as well be speaking to us; for her collection asks us to listen to voices—whether tiny or not—to better understand others’ experiences of the world.