It would be difficult to imagine a better guide to the workings of a dyslexic mind than Philip Schultz, whose memoir is as tender, piercing and exigent as his poetry collections. Schultz didn't know his symptoms had a name until he was 58 and his son was diagnosed with dyslexia. After winning the Pulitzer Prize four years later, he was struck by how often he talked about his dyslexia in public and in interviews, as if it were begging him to pay attention.
Re-analyzing his life through the lens of dyslexia, Schultz uncovers the science behind the learning disability, his misconceptions about his own intelligence and painful memories of his frustration in the classroom and beyond. In distilled, calm prose, he admits that writing about it now causes him great anxiety, even pain. "It's a tricky business," he writes, "trying to understand the labyrinthine and subterranean circuitry of one's own mind." He remembers how, when the spaceship computer comes to life in 2001: A Space Odyssey, he felt he, too, was fighting the very mechanism that controlled him.
Schultz, who did not learn to read until he was 11, describes the effort it still takes to decode printed symbols into meaningful language. And yet combining emotion and language in poetry gives him great joy, which he shares with others as a teacher. Despite his struggles, shame and longtime ignorance--or maybe because of them--his memoir culminates in a resounding message of hope for future generations of students, his son and anyone with a story to tell. --Claire Fuqua Anderson, fiction writer