I am so grateful to Quinn Latimer for including The Glimmering Room in her piece, The Year in Books, in the November/December issue of Frieze Magazine.
"If contemporary poetry is often noted for its intimacy, it is just as often derided for its lack of engagement in the less lyrical and more quotidian world. Yet two recent books of poetry take the task of implication seriously, and in quite different directions. Though Cynthia Cruz begins The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012) with a quote from the Gospel of Thomas that thunders, quietly, ‘If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you,’ the poet’s second book is mostly concerned with the things without – particularly those that damage and destroy. She marries the tropes of lyric poetry (nocturnals, gospels) to an American underclass populated by truckers, laundromats, Seconal and desert. Recalling the glittering, impoverished milieu of Denis Johnson’s early poems and the noun-awed theatrics of Lucie Brock-Broido, Cruz’s ‘traveling minstrel show / called girlhood’ is articulated by the relics delineating its emotional and material deprivation: ‘an old black motorcycle and crutches / Someone left leaning / Against the limb of an oak tree’."
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the-year-in-books/#.UJrhn1uMv1Q.facebook
"If contemporary poetry is often noted for its intimacy, it is just as often derided for its lack of engagement in the less lyrical and more quotidian world. Yet two recent books of poetry take the task of implication seriously, and in quite different directions. Though Cynthia Cruz begins The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012) with a quote from the Gospel of Thomas that thunders, quietly, ‘If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you,’ the poet’s second book is mostly concerned with the things without – particularly those that damage and destroy. She marries the tropes of lyric poetry (nocturnals, gospels) to an American underclass populated by truckers, laundromats, Seconal and desert. Recalling the glittering, impoverished milieu of Denis Johnson’s early poems and the noun-awed theatrics of Lucie Brock-Broido, Cruz’s ‘traveling minstrel show / called girlhood’ is articulated by the relics delineating its emotional and material deprivation: ‘an old black motorcycle and crutches / Someone left leaning / Against the limb of an oak tree’."
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the-year-in-books/#.UJrhn1uMv1Q.facebook
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