The Book

In Dissociative Effect, Jacqueline Redmer, MD, brings us into her poetry collection with a story — her own story. 

“I had never written a poem before in my life, until I was in my early 40s. If you asked me to do so, I would have told you I was a left-brained person.” She didn’t know it at the time, she explains, but she was in need of some new stories.

In her writing, Jacqueline reminds us that humans are made of stories. We have evolved to think and speak in stories, to narrate an unfolding autobiography to ourselves. She shows us that the narrative process is a template for healing. Our lives can be rewritten, retold, restoried. 

The “dissociative effect” is a nod to the anesthetic ketamine and the distance one can feel from living an embodied, authentic life. It is a reference to a shift in perspective, a necessary part of healing, and the wisdom that can come from aging.

Jacqueline uses Dissociative Effect as her own blueprint for healing — exposing lessons learned when one looks deeply at the difficulties encountered in life.  

She writes, “I opened you up to me. And there, in the radiance of darkness, were the seeds for a deserving life.”

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Poetry

I am a physician, mother, and poet.

I believe that humans are stories.  

The need to communicate our identity is deeply connected to the body and soul of a person. This affects the ways we fall ill as well as our unique capacity to heal. 

All human beings have the intrinsic need to be seen and heard. Using our innate gifts of curiosity, creativity, and language, we can work with the content of our lives and fulfill this fundamental human need.  

Let us engage with the conversation that lies both inside and outside of ourselves and bring it to the greater world.


From Jacqueline

About Jacqueline

Endorsements

  • “Poetry is a dance between listening, learning and expressing. Jacqueline Redmer’s experiences as a physician, mother and life explorer has allowed her to beautifully express what it means to be human in all of its messiness. In doing so, she offers a way through. Here writing is a light that peaks from the openings that our difficult times gift us. 5 stars!”

    Dr. David Rakel author of Integrative Medicine, The Compassionate Connection

  • “In her poetry Jacqueline Redmer invites us into the vulnerable and painful moments in life in which our feelings of security and peace and all that we love are unraveling in ways over which we have no control. She invites us to linger with her there in a delicate attentiveness so we can begin to discern a sacred presence that never passes away flowing on and on the hidden recesses all that is passing away.”

    Jim Finley PhD author of The Healing Heart, The Contemplative Path

  • “This debut poetry collection assembles a chorus of voices and narratives to sing of the evolving ways in which we inhabit—or attempt to escape—our bodies across a lifetime. Like the bird who dies throwing herself against her own reflection, the speaker risks 'the price of her own self-examination,' looking shame, depression, pain, and aging head-on. Any reader with a body will find themselves reflected here as Redmer explores how dissociation might ultimately reveal a deeper connection to ourselves, each other, and the world.”

    Cynthia Marie Hoffman MFA, author of Exploding Head

  • "In Dissociative Effect, Jacqueline Redmer merges her skills as a poet and a physician. In these poems, we find Mr. Rogers and prayer, Little Debbie Snack Cakes and shame, mid-life crisis and climate change, longing, reclamation, and so much more. “I share these words,” Redmer writes in the Introduction, “not to tell you about who I am but, rather, as a deeper invitation into your own story.” She has certainly succeeded in presenting readers with this invitation to be more present in our own bodies and stories. I know I’ll want to return to this book again."

    Katie Manning, author of Hereverent and Tasty Other Goes Here

  • "Jacqueline Redmer writes with an exquisite precision that opens space for the reader to feel—not just think. Her voice is intimate, lucid, and brave. These are poems that do not flinch. She invites us to enter our own narratives—those threadbare and luminous strands that define a life—through her own deeply embodied reflections. I did just that. This is the kind of poetry collection I return to again and again, like an old friend, when I need language to meet the parts of me that feel far away or hard to reach. Her poems make visible what often goes unseen—shame, longing, memory, hunger, dissociation, resilience—and they do so with astonishing craft and grace. The language is muscular and tender at once, holding a fierce clarity that heals. Reading these poems, I felt more whole."

    Julie Tallard Johnson, MSW, LCSW, author of The Clue of The Red Thread

Reviews

  • "Original, deftly scripted, insightful, thought provoking, written with both wit and wisdom, intimately personal yet with a universal resonance, the verse comprising "Dissociative Effect" by Dr. Jacqueline Redmer is an absorbing, meditative, and fascinating collection -- and one that will linger in the mind and memory of the reader long after it has been finished and set back upon the shelf."

    - Midwest Book Review

  • "Redmer, a physician, journeys through pain and reclaims wholeness in this introspective poetry collection."

    - Kirkus Reviews

  • "Redmer's writing does that rare, beautiful work of tracing the intersections between her professional medical background and profoundly affecting artistry. The result is a deeply human book that deserves the highest praise and a wide readership."

    - Discovery Reviews