Jacqueline Redmer’s Dissociative Effect is a raw, searing collection of poems shaped by pain, memory, healing, and hope. Part memoir, part emotional excavation, the book moves through themes of trauma, womanhood, embodiment, medicine, and spiritual searching. It opens with a deeply personal introduction that lays the groundwork for what follows. Redmer’s poetry is not a passive reflection, but an active, pulsing lifeline. Across three sections, Pathos, Diagnoses, and ad sanadum, Redmer travels inward, dissects her story, and leaves nothing unexamined. It’s at once intimate and universal. Clinical and poetic. Grief-stricken and triumphant.

Reading this book was not easy. There’s a kind of precision here that only a physician-poet could pull off. Some poems cut like scalpels. Others whisper truths I didn’t know I needed to hear. Redmer doesn’t flinch from the hard stuff, body shame, sexual trauma, mental illness, motherhood, aging, and invisibility. In “dis-comfort food” and “the crime scene,” she writes about girlhood and the betrayal of the body with such clarity, I found myself holding my breath. And then there’s “listen,” a poem that addresses the inability to scream during assault, and it just wrecked me. Her language is so direct. No wasted words. No prettying up the truth. But it’s not just pain for pain’s sake, there’s deep intelligence and heart in these pages.

What stuck with me most was the feeling of coming home to something hard. That ache of knowing and not knowing. Redmer has a gift for taking ordinary moments, eating a peach, watching rain, yoga class, and flipping them inside out to reveal emotional depth you didn’t expect. She made me think about all the ways we dissociate to survive, and what it means to come back to our own bodies. I felt comforted by her honesty, her imperfection, her willingness to say what so many of us only feel. Her poems gave me language for things I thought were unspeakable. And at the same time, I laughed, nodded, and underlined like crazy.

I’d recommend Dissociative Effect to anyone who has lived through trauma, especially women, caregivers, clinicians, survivors, and seekers. If you’ve ever felt too much or not enough, this book will find you where you are. Redmer doesn’t offer tidy answers, but she opens a door. You walk through.

Pages: 86 | ISBN: 1962082822