72 Pages
©2014
Publisher: Four Way Books
Purchase includes: PDF

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Within the world of Wunderkammer, or “cabinet of curiosities,” Cynthia Cruz archives the ruinous, the sparkling, the traumatic, and the decadent. These poems, through sensuous impressions, mimic what it’s like to wake from a dream only to realize you are still inside the dream. We encounter gluttony pinned against starvation—“ceiling high cream cakes, / I ran twelve miles in my ballet leotard” — and the glamorous mixed with the grotesque —“I follow a sequin / Thread of dead things.” Through “brutal music,” Wunderkammer grips at the edges of memory and chaos; these poems have “found the kill / And entered it.”

“Her linguistic palette is glittering and sharp, her vision hallucinogenic and unflinching.” —Dana Levin

“These dark and commanding poems touch the crisis that lies at the very edge of perception. Their crystalline, Baudelairean vision will haunt, trouble, and astonish you.”—Elizabeth Willis

“Cruz exposes that glorious hell that is having a history, having a body, remembering everything and trying to make something good of it. She makes something brilliant of it: fearless close-to-the-bone truthtelling and a triumphant work of art.”—Brenda Shaughnessy

CYNTHIA CRUZ’s poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and others. Her first collection of poems, RUIN, was published by Alice James Book and her second collection, The Glimmering Room, was published by Four Way Books. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.