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Cognitive Debris
Throughout the years, you live and witness and experience. And all of those phenomena are recalled later in varying degrees of completeness and accuracy. These excerpts from life are periods of personal tumult, events that generated intense emotions, and accounts of others' conquests that are so poignant you've never forgotten them, not one detail. They are variations of trite phrases that you've altered to help you better remember them, and fictional stories incubated in your imagination that you augment to become more complex and pleasing. They are funny things you used to say, a trademark phrase, a "youmark"-something everyone at the party expects to hear at least twice from you. You collect them and protect them because they mean something to you, and maybe only you-they are you. We all live with this cognitive debris, and how we interpret and react to the events of each day is filtered through the prism it creates in each of us. This is mine.
114 pages, Paperback
Published October 3, 2016
About the author
Steven C. Nelson
1 book1 followerSteven C. Nelson was raised in Central Ohio, where he still resides with his supportive wife and rambunctious children. His writing is influenced by the contrasting seasons and rural aspects the Midwest has to offer, as well as the purity of the emotions experienced when with his family. What began simply as a means of capturing and contemplating the awesome phenomena life presented to him each day, his first work, Cognitive Debris, is a collection of those ruminations.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 19, 2017
Thank you to author for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! Find many more reviews and an interview with Steven C Nelson on my blog at https://spinesinaline.wordpress.com
As I’ve said before, it’s tough rating a collection because there are some ‘chapters’ that I liked more than others, so it’d be different if I was rating each one individually. And for clarity’s sake, there are both poems and stories in here so I’m going to refer to them as ‘chapters’ though they don’t make up one larger story (at least as far as I can tell).
The collection is broken up into two parts, beginning with prose and then moving to verse, though the prose section makes up more than 2/3rds of the book. While there were several chapters from the first section that stood up, I found that overall I preferred the verse section. There were just a few things that bothered me about the prose. First, which is totally a personal opinion, I prefer prose that doesn’t rhyme so those that did in this collection were at odds with what I like in this genre. There were also some that used unnecessarily long words, sometimes even making up an entire sentence on their own. In these cases, I felt like simpler words could actually allow you to understand the meaning of the whole better, rather than stumble through the reading.
I wasn’t sure entirely how to understand this collection as a whole, which was part of my difficulty in reading the prose section and where I think a second read-through could help. I expected more of a seasonal theme, especially with the first couple chapters involving winter but it wasn’t a continuous theme; it just kind of popped in and out. The more overarching theme seems to be around family and relationships. However, while I could grasp this common theme, I didn’t know how the individual stories related to each other and that’s the main reason I’d like to read through it again.
I did really enjoy this collection! While the layout was a little confusing, the stories and poems themselves were oftentimes very powerful. A few of my favourites were The Last Time, Dichotomy, Cursor, and The Cursed Home was a very fun poem to read! This book is only 100 pages so it’s a nice quick read for when you have some downtime, maybe even when you’re enjoying nature as the front cover suggests.
As I’ve said before, it’s tough rating a collection because there are some ‘chapters’ that I liked more than others, so it’d be different if I was rating each one individually. And for clarity’s sake, there are both poems and stories in here so I’m going to refer to them as ‘chapters’ though they don’t make up one larger story (at least as far as I can tell).
The collection is broken up into two parts, beginning with prose and then moving to verse, though the prose section makes up more than 2/3rds of the book. While there were several chapters from the first section that stood up, I found that overall I preferred the verse section. There were just a few things that bothered me about the prose. First, which is totally a personal opinion, I prefer prose that doesn’t rhyme so those that did in this collection were at odds with what I like in this genre. There were also some that used unnecessarily long words, sometimes even making up an entire sentence on their own. In these cases, I felt like simpler words could actually allow you to understand the meaning of the whole better, rather than stumble through the reading.
I wasn’t sure entirely how to understand this collection as a whole, which was part of my difficulty in reading the prose section and where I think a second read-through could help. I expected more of a seasonal theme, especially with the first couple chapters involving winter but it wasn’t a continuous theme; it just kind of popped in and out. The more overarching theme seems to be around family and relationships. However, while I could grasp this common theme, I didn’t know how the individual stories related to each other and that’s the main reason I’d like to read through it again.
I did really enjoy this collection! While the layout was a little confusing, the stories and poems themselves were oftentimes very powerful. A few of my favourites were The Last Time, Dichotomy, Cursor, and The Cursed Home was a very fun poem to read! This book is only 100 pages so it’s a nice quick read for when you have some downtime, maybe even when you’re enjoying nature as the front cover suggests.
July 16, 2017
Cognitive Debris, the debut work of Steven C Nelson, is a collection of prose and poems dealing with a variety of subjects ranging from seasons to family and love. As I am not a big fan of poems and am ignorant about its nuances, I am reviewing the prose part alone in this blog. The book is broadly classified into verse and prose with the prose taking up majority of the content but is interspersed with poems that go with the theme of the stories around it.
The prose part consists of random musings of the author related to various aspects of life. The few initial thoughts are on winter, its beauty and its influence on people. The rest of the ruminations are about family, togetherness, love and separation. I love the author’s writing style for most of the book and his words have the power to make us introspect about the things we take for granted and also fill us with melancholy for the things we have lost. His writing is honest and beautiful yet simple and heartwarming. There is no common theme that runs through his writing and hence all of the write-up can be read individually and analyzed.
Read more at https://bookescapadeblog.wordpress.co...
The prose part consists of random musings of the author related to various aspects of life. The few initial thoughts are on winter, its beauty and its influence on people. The rest of the ruminations are about family, togetherness, love and separation. I love the author’s writing style for most of the book and his words have the power to make us introspect about the things we take for granted and also fill us with melancholy for the things we have lost. His writing is honest and beautiful yet simple and heartwarming. There is no common theme that runs through his writing and hence all of the write-up can be read individually and analyzed.
Read more at https://bookescapadeblog.wordpress.co...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews