The Danger Model

Evocative poems about art, illness, identity, and the paradoxes of authenticity. Evocative poems about art, illness, identity, and the paradoxes of authenticity. ""How can you ask a question that you live inside?" Madelaine Caritas Longman's debut is an affecting, intelligent engagement with the often-paradoxical pursuit of self-coherence and self-presence. These prose poems, haiku, and experiments with language and form not only examine the individual search for identity but call into question the concept itself. Inhabiting contexts as diverse as the medical system, performance art, queer adolescence, and Talmudic debate, The Danger Model considers what it means to be a "self." Searching for answers in Internet forums, the work of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, and the films and installations of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, Longman brings attention to the lived experience of mental and physical illness and attempts to make meaning out of it. Disarmingly candid, intellectually rigorous, and surprisingly funny, these poems explore the luxury and burden of subjectivity by showing us what it is like to struggle to attach oneself to the world through specific desires and needs. Provocatively realistic but also hopeful, The Danger Model is an investigation of how we come to recognize - or not recognize - ourselves and each other."-- Provided by publisher Cover Copyright Contents white infinity net Transformational Impulses alone in hotels Petrocan broken sunrise Room without walls tall grass Performance Piece: On the Crowd Interlude: Parking Lot through the train window Accumulation of Light in Eyelids stars between So Green Halo the old woman’s hands Strangelove Syndrome [borderline: talk] shadows on the moon Ode to Pessoa Dear Void All I remember about the world according to garp Alexithymia Narcissus Sea Elegy for Lawrence Hong rain in the cedars That summer mourning In human rooms Invincible Performance Piece: On Historia Performance Piece: On Hallucination Performance Piece: On Sincerity Kusama’s Self-Obliteration Iatrogenesis I write the word REAL in red pen repeatedly down my forearm Narcissus Garden A shirt hung over a kitchen chair Intersection Book of Judges Insomnia Something like Living Cracks Tomatoes and Vinegar Fullness January grass After Trainspotting first argument On Compromise After the hours new year’s morning Drumheller creeksong Blank Acts of Daily Living Notes and Sources Acknowledgments "This is poet's poetry, written with keen attention to inner harmonies and the see-saw of words. In an era of Instagram-driven micro-poetry, aka 'Like Poems,' all flimsy and whimsy, The Danger Model is an actual book crammed with actual poems. A vivid, fearless re-visiting of beloved free verse tropes, from dense, manic prose poems to singing, call-and-response, otherworldly hymns. A generous book, The Danger Model hardly feels like a first book. Rather the opposite – a collected works by a senior poet." Quebec Writers' Federation Concordia University First Book Prize jury