Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Back to the Woods

Back to the Woods

Cruz, Cynthia

Paperback

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1954245645
ISBN13: 9781954245648
Publisher: Four Way Books
Published: Sep 15 2023
Pages: 74
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Cynthia Cruz reevaluates the paradox of the death drive in her eighth collection of poetry, Back to the Woods. Could it be that in ceaselessly snuffing ourselves out we are, in fact, trying to survive? In Shine, Cruz's speaker attests that if [she] had a home, it would be // a still in a film / where the sound / got jammed. This book inhabits the silence of the empty orchestra pit, facing dread, and its many / instruments of sorrow. The quiet asks, Did you love this world / and did this world / not love you? We return to the site of our suffering, we perform the symphony of all our old injuries, to master what has broken us. To make possible the future, we retreat into the past. I don't know / the ending. // I don't know anything, our speaker insists, but she follows the wind's off-kilter song of winter / in the pines and the dissonance / of siskins. Cruz heeds the urgency of our wandering, the mandate that we must get back to the woods, not simply for the forest to devour us -- she recognizes in the oblivion flooding out / from its spiral branches an impossible promise. At the tree line, we might vanish to begin again.

Also from

Cruz, Cynthia

View All

Also in

General Poetry

View All