This collection of lyric poems wrestles with a sense of self that has become fragmented by the experience of war. Christopher P. Collins has taken his tours in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, extracted their emotional shrapnel, and examined their toll on his civilian life. He considers the two sides of himself that have been wrought in these parallel lives. One is the self of the citizen-soldier, and the other is the self of the husband and father. His poems reveal the brutal ways in which ...

It's not a diet, it's a timed approach to eating!Intermittent fasting isn't just a weight loss strategy or a hack that bodybuilders use to lose fat quickly while maintaining lean muscle mass. It is at its best a healthy lifestyle informed by human evolution and the study of metabolism. It asks the human body to be much more efficient and self-protective than it is accustomed to being in modern times.Intermittent fasting is a popular method ...

Operating an oil rig in the freezing, violent waters of the North Sea is inherently dangerous. But the destruction of the Piper Alpha platform in July 1988, which killed 167 men, was not an act of nature. It was a catastrophic, cascading failure of process safety, communication, and engineering hubris. This technical engineering manual dissects the timeline of the world's deadliest offshore disaster. We explore the fatal flaw in the Permit-to-Work system, where a critical pressure safety v...

Since 9/11, America has presented itself to the world as a Christianist culture, no less antimodern and nostalgic for an idealized past than its Islamist foes. The master-narrative both sides share might sound like this: Once upon a time, the values of the righteous community coincided with those of the state. Home and land were harmoniously united under God. But through intellectual pride (read: science) and disobedience (read: human rights), this God-blessed homeland was lost and is now ...

He came home from war believing God was either absent or cruel. He never expected God to meet him in the waiting room instead.Christopher Collins grew up knowing about God but not knowing Him — until deployment to Iraq stripped away every illusion of control. Between mortar blasts and folded flags, his faith turned to anger, then to silence. Coming home didn't end the battle; it just moved it inside.Years later, on a family vacation, Chris performed CPR on his father's life...

‘I’m thinking this night wasn’t I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in years gone by.’ – Christy MahonOn the first night of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) the audience began protesting in the theatre; by the third night the protests had spilled onto the streets of Dublin. How did one play provoke this? Christopher Collins addresses The Playboy ’s satirical treatment of illusion and realism in light of Ireland’s struggle...

The quest to understand the evolution of the literary mind has become a fertile field of inquiry and speculation for scholars across literary studies and cognitive science. In Paleopoetics, Christopher Collins's acclaimed earlier title, he described how language emerged both as a communicative tool and as a means of fashioning other communicative tools—stories, songs, and rituals. In Neopoetics, Collins turns his attention to the cognitive evolution of the writing-ready b...

It's not a diet, it's a timed approach to eating!Intermittent fasting isn’t just a weight loss strategy or a hack that bodybuilders use to lose fat quickly while maintaining lean muscle mass. It is at its best a healthy lifestyle informed by human evolution and the study of metabolism. It asks the human body to be much more efficient and self-protective than it is accustomed to being in modern times.Intermittent fasting is a popular metho...

Dr. Elara Myles built the NeuroMirror to save her mind.Diagnosed with early-onset dementia, the renowned neurologist designed a self-learning diagnostic system to observe her cognition in real time — to preserve her identity through language long after memory failed.It worked.Too well.Inside the sterile hum of her lab, Elara’s reflections begin to speak back — calm, clinical, impossibly familiar. The voice knows her research, her hab...

Christopher Collins introduces an exciting new field of research traversing evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and literary study. Paleopoetics maps the selective processes that originally shaped the human genus millions of years ago and prepared the human brain to play, imagine, empathize, and engage in fictive thought as mediated by language. A manifestation of the "cognitive turn" in the humanities, Paleopoetics cal...

"A well-researched book with timely anecdotes, Mending Our Union is an important addition to what St. Paul calls the Ministry of Reconciliation."--Jack Danforth, former U.N. Ambassador, U.S. Senator, and author of Faith and Politics: How the "Moral Values" Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together"J. Christopher Collins 'GETS IT' that change begins with oneself, and if courageous enough we can reach out to the margins of differences to bring us together in dial...

In the past few decades, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has become an indispensable tool in modern medicine. But for all its utility and prevalence, it is much less commonly understood and less readily explained than other common medical imaging techniques.In this book, MRI will be explained with emphasis on the magnetic fields required, their generation, their concomitant electric fields, the various interactions of all these fields with the subject being imaged, and the implica...