On Shaving Off His Face - Softcover

Neilson, Shane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889843821 ISBN 13: 9780889843820

Publisher: Porcupine's Quill, 2015

Synopsis

Shane Neilson's latest collection of poetry draws on the image of the human face to explore themes of pain, grief and illness both physical and mental.

About this title

About the Author

Shane Neilson is a poet and physician who, in addition to several collections of poetry, has published in the genres of memoir, short fiction, biography and literary criticism. He is currently a fellow of the College of Family Physicians of Canada, a Vanier Scholar at McMaster University and editor for Victoria, B.C. publisher Frog Hollow Press. Though he lives in Oakville, Ontario, all of his work is rooted in rural New Brunswick.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Barn

Emblem: we spent an automatism, the sway-backed Moro response reflecting a Landau reaction, patching rotten insides with deviations from this rule.

Waste from the modes of stimulation; the differential fixation a hazard until we laid the lalling stage so that a normal person as abstraction could walk it; and we were a kind of crossmodal,

which parents come to understand. The day idioglossing us over, except when Lennox Gastaut's up on the scaffold, making repair after repair to form the multiplex of Friedreich. Crows, living

in the opisthotonic, hands pronated as hammers, redolent with their Lafora-type shit,
in the barn-shade for quick snorts and AED availability. If asked, violaceous faces would complain of spike-and-wave wages and work harder if my father was found.

Sometimes the prognosis is bad. The sun would heat the hyperexcitable tin and burn though the work gloves. With panoramic vision, a young woman jamais entendu, I thought

of each time I carried a piece of tin up the grand petit absence, just fifteen, interictal on the wood underneath, battle hymns of the benign rolandic, places where

it was distinguishable from premonition if fire or lightning had hit. We papered it over. A jacksonian trick for the men to work past a certain drink

and I remember looking at the old barn, house of vibratory quality: hay and a beaten-down epileptic cry that grew monstrous in the year,

at three in the afternoon, no men around, a wife in fencer's posture soon to be cut
and the gleaming parachute reaction, a drop attack.

Edition details

• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0889843821
• ISBN 13: 9780889843820
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112