Abnormal Repetitive Behaviors

(Paperback)

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Abnormal Repetitive Behaviors explores how we respond to violence, grief, and loss, and the ways animals are emotionally akin to us in those responses. Driven by the ways those primary emotions get tangled with memory, the ways the body informs the mind, we end up feeling and repeating behaviors linked to original struggles long after they h

Reviews

In Abnormal Repetitive Behaviors, Leslie Heywood gives the reader exquisite lyric narrative poems that tackle loss and pain and love with a brave ferocity. These beautifully-crafted poems are polished containers that hold within them all the violence and rage of her childhood home, especially the rage of the father she loves but does not see for years before his death, and the long family legacy of violence that created his rage, and hers, the rage she knows must stop with her. This book is an elegy for him and the loss that permeates all lives, and a testimony to the simple care that can redeem. Terror still lives within these poems and sorrow for the cruelty and chaos of a world in which humans cannot seem to exist without destroying as much as they create, but the vision of a new world is there. What an amazing, powerful book.

--Maria Mazziotti Gillan, winner of the American Book Award and the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award and author of What We Pass On: Collected Poems

Author Bio

Leslie Heywood is a professor of English and creative writing at Binghamton University (SUNY). She is the author of Pretty Good for a Girl (The Free Press/Simon and Schuster 1998), The Proving Grounds (Red Hen Press 2005), and Natural Selection: Poems (Louisiana Literature 2008), which makes the case that the excesses of globalization and consumerism teach us to make each other disposable, much as we treat the trees, water, sky, and soil as expendable through poems that explore the relationship between our lives, our culture, and the natural environment that sustains us. Her academic work includes the books Built to Win: the Female Athlete as Cultural Icon (University of Minnestoa 2003), Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture (University of California 1996), and Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Bodybuilding (Rutgers University 1998), among others. She has published essays on Six Feet Under, Fight Club, the evolutionary origins of stigmatization as manifested in the sport of surfing, surfers and environmental ethics, evolution and fashion, sport as immersive practice, third-wave feminism, and multiple aspects of and issues related to women and sports and embodiment. Her work has been widely published in journals and magazines including Prairie Schooner, Women's Studies Quarterly, Connecticut Review, Paddlefish, The Scholar and the Feminist, the New York Times, Paterson Literary Review, and The Best New American Sports Writing. One of her current interests is learning to utilize the scientific method, which informs her two current creative non-fiction projects, High Wolf Content and Double Dog Dare. She lives in upstate New York with her husband Barry and her daughters Caelan and Keene.