Ruin

By Cruz, Cynthia

Publishers Summary:
"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 California of snow and the surpriseOf illness. I throned myself in the whiteNoise of its silence and watched as the worldFell away. All the silver flickerings of possibilityGoing out like the sound of horse hoovesClicking into the distance. It is almost The end. Anesthesia of medicine and me,Beneath its warm bell of milk. My girlhood wasMicroscopic: a locked window overlooking theSea. An atlas of the disaster: an un-lit hall andA shift in the waves of the field. Blue bedsidePorcelain. Michelle, my little sister, silent asA weed. I took all the things I loved andSmashed them one by one.

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ISBN
978-1-88229-558-6
Publisher
Alice James Books


REVIEWS

Library Journal

Reviewed on July 15, 2006

Although of uneven quality, the poems in this first collection are almost all passionate and full of energy. Cruz writes of family, girlhood, and loss, particularly the death of a brother: "The night I carried my dead brother's body/ To the hospital, I could not/ Remember my own name." In another poem, the poet's pain is even more poignant: "Brother is harvesting my dreams, again./ His skinny trailer park body/ Delicate and terrible as a girl's." Cruz's metaphors, while...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

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