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.
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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.
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