In the middle of his life, Robert Lowell wrote "Memories of West Street and Lepke," a poem that reflected on Lowell's recurrent manias and included the lines "My manic statement." This is Shane Neilson's manic statement, arching backwards through his personal histories (rural, difficult) and then into the current scale of illness: how it prophecizes and destroys. But this is not a book solely given over to a state; Neilson gives most of the book over to love, how it moves him, the disaster of chasing it, and how it settles all the accounts in his life.

Shane Neilson is a family physician who published his first book of poems with Frog Hollow Press in 2008 called Exterminate My Heart. He will publish Meniscus with Biblioasis in 2009, and Alice and George in 2011 with Goose Lane Editions. He also published a memoir about his training as a physician called Call Me Doctor. All of his writings show fealty to his origins in rural New Brunswick. He has also been anthologized in The New Canon (Signature, 2005) and In Fine Form (Polestar, 2005.) Neilson has edited Alden Nowlan and Illness, a book collecting together all of Alden Nowlan's medical poems, and he has just finished work on another anthology about what lies behind poetry called Approaches To Poetry, a book collecting together twenty-seven poets who write about what moves them. It will be published by Frog Hollow late in 2009.

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