Description: "Cynthia Cruz, Back to the Woods, Four Way Books, September 2023"--
Review Quotes: Past Praise for Cynthia Cruz
"Cynthia Cruz's Hotel Oblivion is a harrowing noir, hypnotic in the same way the dull thud of the pulse, from inside pain, can hypnotize. This is a self-portrait of the self that exists--in flashes--in the interstices between what we call the body, what we call the mind, and what we call art (or the study of art, the regard we maintain for art as a human project). Unica Zürn and Jean Genet are the presiding elders of this doubled journey across damaged selfhood and Mitteleuropa. 'The mind, ' Cruz avers, 'is just a dumb machine / that makes small traces, ' poem by poem. 'And I have begun now to imagine, ' Cruz ventures, 'what it might be like / to make art entirely / in solitude, to finally / enter the work, and become / what I have been for so many years / afraid of: the space between, the place / of magnificent, though mostly / terrifying, silence.'"--G.C. Waldrep