Let me count the ways A memoir

Combining elegiac vignettes with luminous prose, poet Morín (Machete) reflects on his coming of age in South Texas and life with obsessive-compulsive disorder. His disorder first emerged when, as a boy in the 1980s, he was told to keep watch for police on his father's frequent missions to get heroin (when he couldn't score, Morín writes, "a stomach folding like an accordion was the only music at night in our house"). With his parents' attentions divided between his father's other family ("He played the role of the Latin lover as if it had been written for him"), drug addiction, and occasional imprisonments, Morín was forced to reckon early on with feelings of alienation and loneliness. Resorting to silence, Morín comforted himself privately through anxious rituals--compulsively blinking and internally reciting "Left Right Left." Those three words punctuate his account as he reflects on masculinity (when the word hombre "dropped... into the lake of my life, its rings spread silently into a future I couldn't imagine"); recounts finding refuge in art and, later, teaching; and reconciles his fraught origins. With quotations from medical literature, historical treatises, and poetry threaded in, the narration is hypnotic, as is Morín's evocative imagery. Readers will find it hard to put this one down. (Mar.)

An impressionistic memoir in essays of a childhood shaped by an addicted parent and a complex set of coping behaviors. Morín takes his title from the sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, excerpted through the text as part of an ongoing reflection on the experience of love as well as the author's obsessive-compulsive disorder. At a very young age, Morín began to count things ("books, forks, carpets, shadows, chairs, even people's feet"), blink his eyes excessively, pick at his skin, suck his shirt collar, and spit. More recently, he's been troubled by intrusive thoughts (his beloved cat's head getting smashed in a door, on loop) and has felt "assaulted by invisible lines that extended from the ends of utensils when they were pointed at me." Though Morín dedicates the book to his mother and grandmother, it is dominated by the men in his life: his alternately gentle and abusive grandfather; his father, whose heroin addiction was an open fact and a family priority; and Jackie, a neighbor, also addicted, whose kindness and affection made him a second father. Though there are many strong passages, the gaps in the storytelling and erratic chronology can be confusing. An extended meditation on childhood in the first half of the book culminates in a vignette in which the author "became one of 8,988 minors arrested for a violent crime in Texas that year….Each of us was between the ages of ten and seventeen. Each of us would answer to the charge of murder or non-negligent manslaughter or forcible rape or robbery or aggravated assault." What did he do? What were the consequences? We never find out. The author's concerns are generally more aesthetic than narrative: "I close my eyes and I am back in that room, watching the dance outside the window, my eyelids, the red of my grandfather's cigarette. My shallow breath is the first note of a song about heartbreak, the soul, and a dove's lonely cry." Sometimes scattershot but also evocative, lyrical, and brave. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.