Dissociative Effect To pay by check please use this order form. We are pleased to take orders from retailers. Email us with details about your order or call us at 207-837-5760. Dissociative Effect is a reflection on several common narratives of girlhood as well as the author's own journey to a more embodied self. In the introduction, Dr. Redmer reminds us that humans have evolved to “think in stories, to talk in stories, to narrate an unfolding autobiography to ourselves in stories . . .” She reminds us that the narrative process is a template for healing as our narrative lives can be rewritten, retold, restoried. The “dissociative effect” is a reference to the anesthetic ketamine and the distance one can sometimes feel from living an embodied, authentic life. It is also a testimonial to the perspective tha is a necessary part of healing and the wisdom that can come from aging. Dr. Redmer uses Dissociative Effect as her own blueprint for healing, exposing lessons learned when one looks deeply at the difficulties encountered in living a life. She writes, “I opened you up to me. And there/in the radiance of darkness/were the seeds for a deserving life.” The topics covered in this manuscript are universal, and many readers will connect deeply with this content. BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Healing / General ISBN: 978-1-962082-82-2 (print; softcover; perfect bound) LCCN: 2025945841 Released September 17, 2025 | Copyright 2025 94 pages |
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Jacqueline S. Redmer, M.D. practices family medicine and palliative care in the Driftless Region of southwest Wisconsin. She is also the mother of three school-aged girls. She started writing poetry during the Covid pandemic to steady herself during the brief pauses of a busy life. Her writing has been published in Examined Life Journal, The Intima Journal, Bramble, Wisconsin Poets Calendar, and Kevin MD Blog. She recently completed the Columbia University Narrative Medicine CPA program and has pursued creative writing courses through Stanford University Continuing Studies Program. Her favorite place to write is in the backyard sauna. |
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“Poetry is a dance between listening, learning, and expressing. Dr. Redmer’s experiences as a physician, mother, and life explorer have allowed her to beautifully express what it means to be human in all of its messiness. In doing so, she offers a way through. Her writing is a light that peaks from the openings that our difficult times gift us. 5 stars!” “Jacqueline Redmer invites us into the vulnerable and painful moments in life when all that we love is unraveling in ways over which we have no control. She invites us to linger with her in delicate attentiveness so we can begin to discern a sacred presence that never passes away.” “I found myself lingering with each poem, not just reading but inhabiting them. Jacqueline Redmer writes with an exquisite precision that opens space for the reader to feel—not just think. Her voice is intimate, lucid, and brave. These are poems that do not flinch. She invites us to enter our own narratives—those threadbare and luminous strands that define a life—through her own deeply embodied reflections. I did just that. This is the kind of poetry collection I return to again and again, like an old friend, when I need language to meet the parts of me that feel far away or hard to reach. Her poems make visible what often goes unseen—shame, longing, memory, hunger, dissociation, resilience—and they do so with astonishing craft and grace. The language is muscular and tender at once, holding a fierce clarity that heals. Reading these poems, I felt more whole. I felt accompanied in my brokenness and reminded of the light that enters there, just as Leonard Cohen says. This is poetry as medicine, as mirror, as movement toward self. I sincerely hope this is the first of many books from this remarkable poet, physician, and citizen. We need voices like hers—honest, compassionate, luminous.” “‘Sometimes, / when you are in your body, / you are not your body,’ writes Jackie Redmer in the opening pages of Dissociative Effect. This debut poetry collection assembles a chorus of voices and narratives to sing of the evolving ways in which we inhabit—or attempt to escape—our bodies across a lifetime. Like the bird that dies throwing herself against her own reflection, the speaker risks ‘the price of her own self-examination,’ looking at shame, depression, pain, and aging head-on. Every reader will find themselves reflected here as Redmer explores how dissociation might ultimately reveal a deeper connection to ourselves, each other, and the world. ‘These days,’ the poet writes, ‘when rain runs off my face / I see the rivulets of water as my very own tears.’” “In Dissociative Effect, Jacqueline Redmer merges her skills as a poet and physician. In these poems,we find Mr. Rogers and prayer, Little Debbie Snack Cakes and shame, mid-life crisis and climate change, longing, reclamation, and so much more. ‘I share these words,’ Redmer writes in the Introduction, ‘not to tell you about who I am but, rather, as a deeper invitation into your own story.’ She has certainly succeeded in presenting readers with this invitation to be more present in our own bodies and stories. I know I’ll want to return to this book again.” |
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News and Reviews “Original, deftly scripted, insightful, thought provoking, written with both wit and wisdom, intimately personal yet with a universal resonance, the verse comprising Dissociative Effect by Dr. Jacqueline Redmer is an absorbing, meditative, and fascinating collection—and one that will linger in the mind and memory of the reader long after it has been finished and set back upon the shelf. This paperback edition of Dissociative Effect from Shanti Arts is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal and community library Contemporary American Poetry collections.” |
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