Hotel Oblivion

by Cynthia Cruz

A specter, haunting the edges of because neoliberalism insists there are no social classes, thus, there is no working class, the main subject of Hotel Oblivion , a working class subject, does not exist. With no access to a past, she has no home, no history, no memory. And yet, despite all this, she will not assimilate. Instead, this book chronicles the subject’s repeated attempts at locating an exit from capitalist society via acts of negative freedom and through engagement with the death drive, whose aim is complete destruction in order to begin all over again. In the end, of course, the only true exit and only possibility for emancipation for the working class subject is through a return to one’s self. In Hotel Oblivion , through a series of fragments and interrelated poems, Cruz resists invisibilizing forces, undergoing numerous attempts at transfiguration in a concerted effort to escape her fate.

Genres: Poetry

First published February 15, 2022

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

[Richard S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book and a real return to form to the extremely high quality of poetry found in Cynthia Cruz’s first two books.

[Barry Westbrook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, sad and profound. I could read this again and again for days and come away with new and deeper understandings each time

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Each poem felt… two-thirds finished? Read more like notes to herself for another draft than standalone poems

[Mark Vrabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes the mind (soul?) benefits from reading poetry as a respite from STEM (I was reminded of STEM in "trying to find the perfect equation, truth as a numerical solution") and the structure of most other forms of written material. And I still cling to the (naïve?) hope there is something unique to the human experience and spirit that AI-generated text fails to capture, in simple lines like "intricate like the broken traces of memory that occur upon waking" or excerpts such as these three:

When I was small and electric
only the nighttime
knew me

and when they run,
their bodies are young
and not yet owned
by anyone.

Empty vessel, I take all of it in,
so I can give you this thing.
Beautiful, sometimes, but almost
always broken, and imperfect,
this poem, this song, this fragment

These poems (most of which are titled "Fragment") appear to be written in hotel rooms in Warsaw, Berlin ("Berlin is strange in that it exists only in black and white"), and Belgrade, with a series of repeated images and phrases that creates a sort of gradual unfolding effect. What it means to archive/document recurs throughout, such as in these two passages:

I am trying to archive
the mundane details of my life,
then cut and fix them
into this poem.
But I have forgotten
nearly everything.

I have taken to photographing
my every moment
in an attempt to locate the place
where I lost myself

The following resonated with me personally because at my age, there are things that don't energize or ignite passion like they did when I was young:

Where is the essence from which
music and desire originate.
And how do I return to that.

For poetry, I have trouble adhering to the Goodreads Likert-like rating scale: I suppose it can be a bell curve where five stars are reserved for Dickinson et al. and one star is for either of the extremes of being too simplistically/earnestly on-the-nose, or too indecipherable/impenetrable to be even remotely readable. In that context, I think a lot of poetry is invariably three-star. I wanted to give this four but don't read enough poetry to fairly compare.

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award and I have a hard time seeing why. It was full of allusions and relationships to people and places that meant little to me, that I couldn’t relate to, and I learned very little about these people and places by reading the poetry. There were notes in the back but I didn’t find them helpful. There was one name that was vaguely familiar, Jean Genet, that I looked up online but it was only vaguely helpful. Even a simple one paragraph introduction by the poet regarding the people and places (most of which are in Europe) would have helped orient me.

Because the poems in which these people and places appeared weren’t very descriptive, it felt like name-dropping–to be understood only by people in the know in order to separate the poet and her ilk from people not in the know. And without knowing about those people and places, the only thing to keep me interested in the poetry is the poetry itself, yet the language didn’t do anything for me. No poem particularly stood out to me, but if one had, I’d have had a difficult time referring to it because many of the poems had the same title.

Clearly, having won a prize, there are people who think highly of this book. I won’t discourage anyone from reading it but it wasn’t for me.

[Addison · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of poetry that shows the power of repetition, remix, and iteration. Often when I read poetry books, I can mainly focus on how I feel- this collection by Cruz left me feeling a painful inspiration to live a life filled with more lust and purpose. Along with the feeling of this book, the characters, images, and themes stuck with me in a way that other poetry collections may struggle to do.

Phosphorescence

Photographs of photographs and Polaroids
of stacks of books on fragments
and photographs and pamphlets
on letters sent and imminent
collisions. What the body does not know
it wants. And the mind.
In the song I wrote,
I said I wanted to be
like you, but then
I pulled back.
I am afraid most of the time
of my own intensity.
Not its kinesis, its brilliant light
and energy, but that it might
frighten you.
I have tried my whole life
to contain it, hold it
back. Make myself
into the perfect song,
the most contained
poem. But now I am
letting go of all that.
I have taken to photographing
my every moment
in an attempt to locate
the place where I lost myself.
When the body and the mind conflate
or, rather, when the body and language.
That is the moment I have been waiting for.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I reserve the right to change my mind about this one, but on a first read, I was underwhelmed. I've read all of Cruz's previous collections and other works, including The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class, but even so, I couldn't make heads nor tails of what these poems were doing. There were plenty of intriguing lines and great language, but the enjoyment was fleeting because I couldn't understand what was happening.

[Simón · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dismal, claustrophobic, intertextual. Admire the repetition between poems, sometimes of precise phrases but more often referencing the same activity, like Genet "tending" to prisoners or taking Polaroids. I'm seeing the connections between this and her essays on silence. Silence is important. It makes space.

I was sad reading this. Sad is okay. My favorite poems were about Sabine. Sabine has insights.

[Chris Meinke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked the way this collection unfolded, the repeating phrases, images, and allusions built up upon each other, like the steady push pull of ocean waves hiding the rising tide. It gave nuance to the ambiguity of exploring identity, purpose, and navigating our environments both outside and within

[Carly Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poets--Cruz's syntax and the obsession around repeated images makes this one of those collections that really lights the brain on fire, sparks the notion that we can repeat and obsess as we build toward a whole.

[Isaac Salazar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was tautological. I don’t know how to feel.