In his long-awaited first book of prose, poet and essayist Sherod Santos takes a compelling look into some of poetry’s deepest secrets, an investigation that leads him to the surprising conclusion that poems have minds of their own, minds often inaccessible even to the one who composed them. In these essays, Santos explores not only what he thinks about poetry but also what and how poetry thinks about itself. His writings range across the history of Western poetry, from formative classical myths to modern experimental forms, and touch on subjects as diverse as the rhetorical history of cannibalism, the political and cultural uses of translation, and the current state of American poetry. Along the way, he calls on past poets like Ovid, Baudelaire, and Phyllis Wheatley, on twentieth-century poets like Wallace Stevens, H. D., and Rainer Maria Rilke, and on writers and thinkers like Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, Simone Weil, and Paul de Man. These essays explore facets of poetry known best to one who has practiced the art for years. From the methods of poetic attention to the processes by which perception is transformed into language and from the illusive relationship between poetry and “meaning” to the integral relationship between poetry and memory, this collection delves into what it means to be a poet and how being a poet is intimately tied to one’s social and cultural moment. With Santos’s trademark flair for seeking out the overlooked and unforeseeable, A Poetry of Two Minds is an extraordinary collection that testifies to its author’s far-reaching intellectual curiosity. Readers who have delighted in his insights over the years can now have the satisfaction of having them caught between the covers of this provocative book.

AS SEEN ON THIS MORNING 'a fascinating and moving account of life working with people who too often society wants to forget' Dr Amanda Brown, author of THE PRISON DOCTOR 'excellent and enlightening' Jonathan Levi and Emma French, authors of INSIDE BROADMOOR 'thought provoking' Gwen Adshead, author of THE DEVIL YOU KNOW Shocking, eye-opening and grimly fascinating, these are the true stories, patients and cases that have characterised a career spent treating mentally disordered offenders. As a forensic psychiatrist, it's Dr Das's job to treat and rehabilitate what the tabloids might call the 'criminally insane', many of whom assault, rob, rape, and even kill. His work takes him to high-security prisons and securely locked hospital wards across the country, as well as inside courtrooms, giving evidence as an expert witness. From the young woman who smothered her two-year-old nephew in a flash of psychosis, to the teenager who set his house on fire with his mother locked inside, Dr Das must delve into the minds of these violent offenders to elicit their symptoms of mental illness, understand their actions and prevent future atrocities. In this honest, revealing and at times humorous memoir, Dr Das shares stories from his fifteen years as a psychiatric doctor working with this dangerous clientele, detailing some of his most extreme, heart-breaking and bizarre cases - and how he's learned to live with his mistakes when the worse happens. Compelling, enlightening and candid, if you enjoyed Unnatural Causes, Dark Side of the Mind or The Prison Doctor, you'll love IN TWO MINDS.

Follows the adventures of two royal teenagers who possess extraordinary mental powers.

Meditations on the life of poetry by an award-winning poet

Being of Two Minds examines the place that early modern literature held in Modernist literary criticism. For T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Empson, the early modern period helps model a literary future. At stake in their engagements across time were ontological questions about literature and its ability to mediate between the one and the many, the particular and the general, life and death, the past and the present. If reading and writing literature enables the mind to be in two places at once, creative experience serves as a way to participate in an expanded field of consciousness alongside mortality. Goldberg reads the readings that these modernists performed on texts that Eliot claimed for the canon like the metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists, but also Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Margaret Cavendish. Ontological concerns are reflected in Eliot’s engagement with Aristotle’s theory of the soul and Empson’s Buddhism. These arguments about being affect minds and bodies and call into question sexual normativity: Eliot glances at a sodomitical male-male mode of literary transmission; Woolf produces a Judith Shakespeare to model androgynous being; Empson refuses to distinguish activity from passivity to rewrite gender difference. The work of one of our leading literary and cultural critics, Being of Two Minds spans centuries to show how the most compelling and surprising ideas about mind, experience, and existence not only move between early modernity, high modernism, and our own moment, but are also constituted through that very movement between times and minds.

Black-and-white illustrations accompany a collection of poems, specially designed for children aged eight to eleven.

Emily Díaz has spent her whole life in two worlds. As a child of Mexican parents in South Texas, she maneuvered the terrain of two cultures, two economic classes, and two languages. At Yale, the discovery that she is in love with a woman sends her into a vortex of self-doubt that fragments her worlds even further. In Boston, she must face the divide between her outward heterosexual world and her internal emotional desires. Finally, she must risk destroying her relationship with her devoutly Mexican mother by telling the truth about who she is.