Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Reviewed by Poetry Foundation
Reviewed by Los Angeles Review of Books
Reviewed by National Book Critics Circle
A specter, haunting the edges of society: because neoliberalism insists there are no social classes, thus, there is no working class, the main subject of Hotel Oblivion, a working class subject, does not exist. With no access to a past, she has no home, no history, no memory. And yet, despite all this, she will not assimilate. Instead, this book chronicles the subject’s repeated attempts at locating an exit from capitalist society via acts of negative freedom and through engagement with the death drive, whose aim is complete destruction in order to begin all over again. In the end, of course, the only true exit and only possibility for emancipation for the working class subject is through a return to one’s self. In Hotel Oblivion, through a series of fragments and interrelated poems, Cruz resists invisibilizing forces, undergoing numerous attempts at transfiguration in a concerted effort to escape her fate.
Review
"Cruz offers in Hotel Oblivion a deeply felt excavation of hierarchically damaging language....Cruz expands and transcends the interiority of the lyrical 'I', achieving a fresh and vital depiction of the I-Thou relationship in poetry. This is a wholly original book, one in which Cruz’s luminous music attains a self-realized language singing out of the disaster." — Los Angeles Review of Books
About the Author
Cynthia Cruz was born on a US Air Force Base in Germany and grew up in Northern California. She received a BA from Mills College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
Cruz is the author of seven poetry collections, including Hotel Oblivion (Four Way Books, 2022); How the End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016); Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014); The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012); and Ruin (Alice James Books, 2006). She is also the author of two works of nonfiction: The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (Watkins Media, 2021), a sociopolitical study, and her essay collection, Disquieting: Essays on Silence (Book*hug, 2019).