Description:
In June the Labyrinth is a book-length serial poem that is part pilgrimage, part elegy, in which the main character, Elle, embarks on a quest of sorts, investigating not only the "labyrinth" as myth and symbol, but the "labyrinth of the broken heart."
Brief description: Cynthia Hogue has published thirteen books, including eight collections of poetry, most recently Revenance, listed as one of the 2014 "Standout" books by the Academy of American Poets. In June the Labyrinth (Red Hen Press, 2017) is her ninth poetry collection. With Sylvain Gallais, Hogue co-translated Fortino Sámano (The overflowing of the poem), from the French of poet Virginie Lalucq and philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (Omnidawn 2012), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2013. Among Hogue's other honors are an NEA Fellowship in poetry, the H.D. Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, a MacDowell Colony residency, and the Witter Bynner Translation Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Hogue served as the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University in the Spring of 2014. She was a 2015 NEA Fellow in Translation, and holds the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix.
Review Quotes:
"What is happening when a book following (in every sense) a mother's death takes the form of a postmodernist stream of consciousness, giving full weight to space and silence, to the roots and routes of language, and to the predicament of the body? The poet's mind, as it were, breaking and entering? Today I could say I read In June the Labyrinth, or I could say I let the poem carry me downstream. The ghost of Shelley waved from the bank of the river. The world was being shattered but I was safe, thanks to Cynthia Hogue's well-made craft, in which I rode." -Alicia Ostriker, author of The Book of Seventy, winner of the Jewish National Book Award
"Hogue has a knack for intensity. And she ingeniously describes natural processes in apt human terms--for instance, "the concentration it takes / for water to become / ice.". . . Hogue's particular wit and intensity relay not merely the appearance of art, but the experience of it, 'its complication of what is.'" --Craig Morgan Teicher, New York Times Sunday Book Review
"Reading Cynthia Hogue's gorgeous new book is a little like being in a labyrinth: you know where you're going, but the turns keep surprising you and taking you places you didn't expect. This wonderful long poem--unbroken, again like a labyrinth--is heartbreaking, but the aesthetic richness and emotional depth make it a great gift." --Martha Collins, author of One: An American Scrapbook and Blue Front
"Cynthia Hogue's In June the Labyrinth is a stunning and unforgettable book. It is a letting in of grief rather than a letting go. Hogue's poems demonstrate how one does not recover but rather uncovers and discovers truths about the other's being in relation to oneself. Ultimately, these truths come to rest in language itself, in the poem embodied as a form of conscious companion."--Heather Thomas, The Florida Review