Guidebooks for the Dead($16.95Value)

Description

In Guidebooks for the Dead , Cynthia Cruz returns to a familiar literary landscape in which a cast of extraordinary women struggle to create amidst violence, addiction and poverty. For Marguerite Duras, evoked here in a collage of poems, the process of renaming herself is a “Quiet death,” a renewal she envisions as vital to her evolution. In “Duras (The Flock),” she is “high priestess” to an imagined assemblage of women writers for whom the word is sustenance and weapon, “tiny pills or bullets, each one packed with memory, packed with a multitude of meaning.” Joining them is the book’s speaker, an “I” who steps forward to declare her rightful place among “these ladies with smeared lipstick and torn hosiery. . . this parade of wrong voices.” Guidebooks for the Dead is both homage to these women and a manifesto for how to survive in a world that seeks to silence those who resist. " In Guidebooks for the Dead , Cynthia Cruz returns to a familiarliterary landscape in which a cast of extraordinary women struggle tocreate amidst violence, addiction, and poverty...." The Rumpus Published On: 2019-12-20 Cynthia Cruz is the author of six collections of poetry: Ruin (Alice James Books, 2006), The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012), Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014), How the End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016), Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018) and Guidebooks for the Dead (Four Way Books, 2020). A collection of critical essays, Disquieting: Essays on Silence, was published by Book*hug in 2019. Her second collection, The Melancholia of Class, is forthcoming from Repeater Books in 2021. A novella, Steady Diet of Nothing, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Cruz's background is in German literature and philosophy. She regularly publishes essays and art writing in The Brooklyn Rail and Degree Critical. Cruz is the Kowald Visiting Writer in Poetry in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the City College of New York. Cruz for Fall 2019/Spring 2020. Cruz also teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Columbia University Graduate Writing Department.