Synopses & Reviews
"Cynthia Cruz's passionate, intense poems inhabit a landscape of fates and fatal hungers, nightmares and dangerous desires, in which enchantment and terror are so intimate that they become one."-Reginald Shepherd
Reader, take heed: These are no ordinary poems about childhood. In a series of secular prayers, Cynthia Cruz alludes to a girlhood colored by abuse and a brother's death. A beautifully understated sense of menace and damage pervades this vivid, nonlinear tale.
"January"
A Californiaof snow and the surprise
Of illness. I throned myself in the white
Noise of its silence and watched as the world
Fell away. All the silver flickerings of possibility
Going out like the sound of horse hooves
Clicking into the distance. It is almost the end
Of the World.Anesthesia of medicine and me,
Beneath its warm bell of milk. My girlhood was
Microscopic: a locked window overlooking the
Sea. An atlas of the disaster: an un-lit hall and
A shift in the waves of the field. Blue bedside
Porcelain. Michelle, my little sister, silent as
A weed. I took all the things I loved and
Smashed them one by one.
Cynthia Cruzholds a BA from MillsCollegeand an MFA from SarahLawrenceCollege, and has received several residencies to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Isn't it Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger Poets and The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries.
Review
Cynthia Cruzs passionate, intense poems inhabit a landscape of fates and fatal hungers, nightmares and dangerous desires, in which enchantment and terror are so intimate that they become one.”Reginald Shepherd
"...the poems in this first collection are almost all passionate and full of energy...Cruz says: 'I spent a lifetime inside the destruction./ And like anyone, I made a world someplace else.' These poems are that world: tough, sometimes hard to swallow, but certainly compelling."Library Journal
"To enjoy these poems...is to permit the elliptical mind of a poet deeply grieved and disquieted, who is sifting through detritus and artifacts presumably to find reconciliation, or a way to heal."Small Spiral Notebook
"This is not a book about peacocks in twilight nor should it be read in the parlor. These spare, intense poems are both terrifying and excruciatingly tender, often both at once. Rarely is mystery so lucid, rarely does poetry rush so directly to the marrow. Ruin is a brilliant debut."Thomas Lux
Synopsis
Poetry. Reader, take heed: These are no ordinary poems about childhood. In a series of secular prayers, Cynthia Cruz alludes to a girlhood colored by abuse and a brother's death. A beautifully understated sense of menace and damage pervades this vivid, nonlinear tale. "Cynthia Cruz's passionate, intense poems inhabit a landscape of fates and fatal hungers, nightmares and dangerous desires, in which enchantment and terror are so intimate that they become one"--Reginald Shepherd. Cynthia Cruz holds degrees from Mills College and Sarah Lawrence College and has received several residencies to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.
Synopsis
This confident, intense debut speaks of ruined childhoods with both terror and tenderness.
Synopsis
Reader, take heed: These are no ordinary poems about childhood. In a series of secular prayers, Cynthia Cruz alludes to a girlhood colored by abuse and a brothers death. A beautifully understated sense of menace and damage pervades this vivid, nonlinear tale.
About the Author
Cynthia Cruz is a contemporary American poet. Her first collection of poems, Ruin, was published by Alice James Books in 2006, and reviewed by The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Library Journal and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Brown Paper, Boston Review Denver Quarterly Guernica and The Paris Review, and in anthologies including Isn't it Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger Poets (Wave Books, 2004), and The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, edited by the late poet Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press, 2004). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Yadoo and the MacDowell Colony. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is an adjunct lecturer in English at Queens College. She previously taught writing and literature at Fordham University and Westchester Community College. She has also taught writing in homeless shelters, and to women in the eating disorder ward of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and to children in the West Bank. Her work with children includes tutoring homeless children in reading and writing, and teaching literature and writing to at-risk teenagers, and elementary school students. Born in Germany, Cruz grew up in northern California, where she got her B.A. at Mills College. She earned her M.F.A. at Sarah Lawrence College. She currently lives in Brooklyn.