Descartes' Nightmare explores the apparently irreconcilable split between body and mind by dissecting nightmares. The poems collected here do not revolve around Descartes but project a speaker, "a nightmarist by trade," compelled to collect the nightmares of others and to consider the way the nervous system functions in the modern age. Along with Descartes, other figures with fitting nightmares appear from the work of Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, and Arthur Rimbaud. Recurrent images of technology enhance the experience of felt simultaneity in an eerie landscape of spectral selves-soldiers, addicts, specimens, and skulls. The dreamlike quality of the poems provokes within the reader a sense of the uncanny, the familiar haunted by the deeply unfamiliar.