Autobiography by Rebecca Macijeski
Autobiography by Rebecca Macijeski
SPLIT ROCK PRESS POETRY CHAPBOOK SERIES
Autobiography is a celebration of the experience of discovering, recovering, and re-envisioning the self. At the center of these poems is the impulse toward imagination as a vital tool for reconciling what it’s like to move through the world from a neurodivergent perspective. Rather than offering more traditionally accepted or expected narrative constructions of what builds a life, these poems are interested in exploring selfhood through metaphor. Each poem argues a different way to see the brain as a temperamental collaborator in the creation of self. The brain and self are interlinked, but not entirely unified or harmonious; their relationship becomes complicated—sometimes friends, sometimes adversaries, always searching for new methods to grapple with reality.
SAMPLE POEMS in Split Rock Review
SAMPLE POEM in Ghost City Review
Publisher: Split Rock Press
Paperback: 40 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 9
ISBN: 978-1-7354839-3-1
Release Date: November 10, 2022
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rebecca Macijeski is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing Programs at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. She holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a BA in English and Music from Simmons College (now Simmons University). She has attended artist residencies with The Ragdale Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Art Farm Nebraska. She’s worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column, worked as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain, and is the recipient of a 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Conduit, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, and many others. Follow her on Twitter at @RMacijeski, or read more of her poems at www.rebeccamacijeski.com.
PRAISE FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In her first line of this fine chapbook Rebecca Macijeski claims “my brain is a quiet room I enter every morning” but luckily for us that room becomes a profound musicality that her “brain” gives us, in precise and original “metaphors she makes every day.” Page after page, these are the kind of lyric poems your own brain and particularly your own heart will be long hesitant to let go. They are still holding on to mine.
— Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things
The unlikely star of Rebecca Macijeski’s Autobiography is the speaker’s brain—which appears as a vegetable garden, a stenographer’s report, an old man in sensible shoes, and in a myriad of other guises. Ultimately, this highly inventive series of poems is an exploration of identity and imagination. It turns the sealed stone of the reader’s own brain into a disco of things coming alive.
— Grace Bauer, author of Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems
Macijeski’s poems are an act of stunning and recursive world-making in which the interiority of the mind becomes the imaginative pulse of our perspectives, our politics, and the very nature of human subjectivity. With eccentric force and dynamic metaphorical movement, Autobiography is a collection you will not want to put down—its playful elegance drawing you in for more metaphor, more self, more vision of a world made new.
— Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography