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    Back to the Woods
    Back to the Woods
    Back to the Woods
    Ebook66 pages14 minutes

    Back to the Woods

    By Cynthia Cruz

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    About this ebook

    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. 
     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFour Way Books
    Release dateSep 15, 2023
    ISBN9781954245655
    Back to the Woods

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      Book preview

      Back to the Woods - Cynthia Cruz

      ALSO BY CYNTHIA CRUZ

      POETRY

      Hotel Oblivion

      Guidebooks for the Dead

      Dregs

      How the End Begins

      Wunderkammer

      The Glimmering Room

      Ruin

      CULTURAL CRITICISM

      The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class

      Disquieting: Essays on Silence

      FICTION

      Steady Diet of Nothing

      BACK TO THE WOODS

      CYNTHIA CRUZ | POEMS

      FOUR WAY BOOKS

      TRIBECA

      Copyright 2023 Cynthia Cruz

      No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Cruz, Cynthia, author.

      Title: Back to the woods / Cynthia Cruz.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2023004449 (print) | LCCN 2023004450 (ebook) | ISBN 9781954245648 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781954245655 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

      Classification: LCC PS3603.R893 B33 2023 (print) | LCC PS3603.R893 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23/eng/20230202

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004449

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004450

      This book is manufactured in the United States of America and printed on acid-free paper.

      Four Way Books is a not-for-profit literary press. We are

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