Description: "Cynthia Cruz's latest collection, Sweet Repetition, deftly embraces cyclicality and the accumulation of meaning over time. Words, phrases, and titles echo throughout this book-length sequence of poems, forming new constellations with each passing encounter. This lyrical conceit is not merely repetition for repetition's sake, though, but is instead political. The structure of repetition is inherently revolutionary: Repetition revisits and revises, altering the course of history by nature of its movement. By centering repetition as a structural device, Cruz invites the specter of Sigmund Freud to hover over the book-namely, his 1914 paper "Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through." In Freudian analysis, the things we repress-what we know but don't want to know-reappear in the actions we repeat. This form of unknowing, of remaining unaware of what our unconscious knows, is to Cruz a form of knowing in and of itself. The minimalist lyricism of Sweet Repetition invites its readers to experience such knowing in real time and to recognize pulsing, unforeseen beauty in the recurrence of images, archetypes, and obsessions"--
Brief description: Cynthia Cruz is the author of eight books of poetry, two works of nonfiction, and one novel. Her collection Hotel Oblivion was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School.
Review Quotes: "Expertly employing her distinct, unsentimental voice, Cruz's poems dwell in the bittersweet and often heartbreaking liminality of dreaming and memory, where 'the movement / Of always leaving and returning' is most acutely felt. I can't imagine a reader who will not recognize the sensation of encountering in their own lucid but elusive dreamscape or remembrance a childhood or place of origin, 'a lifetime of cities away, ' 'warped but beautiful.' Sweet Repetition is a prime example of the possibilities of lyric poetry." --Rosa Alcalá, author of "YOU"