Dementia Blog

Susan M. Schultz”s Dementia Blog is as astonishing as it is tragic. Following the odd form of the blog, which is written forward in time but read backwards, it charts the fragmented disorienting progression (if this is the word) of her mother”s dementia. Well schooled in the unpersonism of post-modern innovative poetry, (”dementia destroys the self, but that destruction is oddly, horribly, poetic,” she says), Schultz sees through her family”s personal tragedy to the profound social and philosophical implications of the unraveling of sense and soul: a deranged nation, so unmoored from coherence that it is unable to feel the difference between political rhetoric and the destructiveness of war. Full of intimate personal detail, Dementia Blog sweetly and sadly unwinds itself into timelessness.