Synopses & Reviews
The fourth installment of our Spotlight poetry series, Stranger in Town is the second full-length collection by San Francisco poet Cedar Sigo. Reflecting queer identity while eschewing all clichés, Stranger exudes an urban mysticism redolent of the SF Renaissanceparticularly John Weinersas it collages the fragmented experiences of contemporary culture.
Born in 1978 on the Suquamish Indian Reservation in Washington state, Cedar Sigo studied at Naropa under Anne Waldman and Lisa Jarnot. His first book, Selected Writings (2003), was reprinted in a revised edition in 2005. A writer on art, literature, and film, Sigo recently blogged for SFMOMA's Open Space.
Review
"Sigo’s poems are their own. They blend effortless hipness with a roving intelligence attracted to urbanity, longing, glamour, isolation, romance, accident, and collision. The net result of the various aspects of Sigo’s poems is a poetics of flux that exists in the past as much as present and the future, but belongs to none of the above. The poems seem at once contemporary and antiquated, totally alien and uncannily familiar, so that they operate with a realm of uncertainty where any movement the poem makes is charged with potential." --Ben Mirov, BOMB
Synopsis
Redolent of Weiners, Whalen, and Lamantia, Stranger in Town is the second coming of the SF Renaissance.
About the Author
Cedar Sigo was born in 1978 on the Suquamish Indian Reservation in Washington State. He obtained an MFA from the Naropa Institute, studying poetry under Anne Waldman and Lisa Jarnot. After moving to San Francisco in 1999, Sigo published his first book, Selected Writings, with Ugly Duckling Presse. He writes on art and literature and recently blogged for SFMOMA.