Title: Dissociative Effect
Author:Jacqueline Redmer
Publisher/Publication Date: Shanti Arts LLC, September 23, 2025
Language: English
Format/Pages: Softcover, 86 pages
Genre: Poetry
ISBN-10: 1962082822
ISBN-13: 978-1962082822
Reviewed by:Michelle Caffrey
When distance becomes insight
The phrase “dissociative effect” speaks to the subtle distance that grows between ourselves and the lives we are living, a sense of watching rather than fully inhabiting our days. In this collection, Jacqueline Redmer, M.D., explores that distance with honesty and care, showing how shifting perspective can become an essential part of healing and how wisdom often arrives through aging and lived experience. Dissociative Effect reflects what can be learned when we look closely at the difficulties encountered in living a life.
As a physician, Redmer approaches female anatomy not through diagnosis, but through metaphor, memory, and lived experience. The body becomes a site of knowing, bearing the marks of care, endurance, and change. I was especially drawn to the poems that explore how easily we drift from ourselves. Through caregiving, work, grief, and expectation, Redmer captures that familiar distance with clarity and compassion. Her poetry allows space for reflection, for aging, and for the slow return to an embodied life.
What stayed with me most was the quiet permission these poems offer: to look again at one’s own story, to sit with discomfort, and to trust that healing does not have to be loud or linear. In the final poem, Redmer writes “of the practice of wanting a life,” the quiet center of the book. The simple act of saying I want becomes a transition point, a passageway back to the self, and a movement toward reclaiming one’s own life. That recognition makes Dissociative Effect linger long after the last page.
Reviewed by Michelle Caffrey Michelle is the best-selling author of Bring Jade Home: The True Story of a Dog Lost in Yellowstone and the award-winning picture book Jade – Lost in Yellowstone. She is a former full-time RVer and Workcamper.
