Guidebooks for the Dead

by Cynthia Cruz

In Guidebooks for the Dead, Cynthia Cruz returns to a familiar literary landscape in which a cast of extraordinary women struggle to create amidst violence, addiction and poverty. For Marguerite Duras, evoked here in a collage of poems, the process of renaming herself is a “Quiet death,” a renewal she envisions as vital to her evolution. In “Duras (The Flock),” she is “high priestess” to an imagined assemblage of women writers for whom the word is sustenance and weapon, “tiny pills or bullets, each one packed with memory, packed with a multitude of meaning.” Joining them is the book’s speaker, an “I” who steps forward to declare her rightful place among “these ladies with smeared lipstick and torn hosiery. . . this parade of wrong voices.” Guidebooks for the Dead is both homage to these women and a manifesto for how to survive in a world that seeks to silence those who resist.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 2020

About the author

Cynthia Cruz is the author of Ruin (Alice James Books) as well as The Glimmering Room, Wunderkammer and How the End Begins (all from Four Way Books). She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder Fellowship. An essayist and art writer, her first collection of essays, Notes Toward a New Language is forthcoming. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is currently a doctoral student in Germanic Language and Literature.

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guidebooks for the Dead as a collection works very well for me, as someone who has read all of Cynthia Cruz's collections and her recent book of essays, Silence. I appreciate Guidebooks as a capstone work in the vein Cruz has been working through since the beginning. The individual pieces here could be baffling on their own, but if you see the collection as an entire work, it hangs together beautifully. I'll have to give it some further thought, but what occurred to me is that Guidebooks for the Dead could be compared to The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot as long poem with movements and thematic threads. If you really want to fully appreciate what Cruz is doing here, also see her essay collection Silence. There she explores how poverty and marginalization are expressed in art (and in metal illness) as silence and how surrealism and collage can be used to express the experience of those who suffer in silence. All those techniques are on display here. It is my plan to re-read all of Cynthia Cruz's work sometime in the near future with the perspective gained from the essays and from this collection.

[K.K. Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"She paces. She drinks the cold liquor. When she does, the world / is made manifest."

"When writing, the writer dies. She dies to the world."

"The wreckage gazes back at her and she / becomes the wreckage."

"Piled up, her words are a tower of filthy bodies."

"Somewhere there is a god, / I swear. / Someone must be in charge."

"I'm channeling God, again."

[Barbara Esgalhado · Rating 1 out of 5]

A fine poet, but this is not her strongest work.

[Carly Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cynthia Cruz always breaks me open with her syntax. Her poems continue to be sharp mysteries I'll gladly revisit again and again.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating collection working with the reference and intimacy of past authors, the readerly relationship, and futurity.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

a very silver and lace book. gorgeous.