Back to the Woods
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cruz's latest (after Hotel Oblivion) examines the human inclination for self-destruction. Reframing questions of human survival, these poems contend with the ruinous remains of life in the Anthropocene, "Marred with glitch// cracked and mangled/ like satellites/ crashing into a gas giant." Addressing environmental destruction, mass violence, and self-annihilating substance abuse, Cruz suggests that what is actually sought is a kind of transformation, and possible redemption, through obliteration. Recurring images such as a cassette tape ("the murmur/ of your voice// recorded back/ into the black// gauze of its matte/ ribbons.// Its blur of tape/ unspooled,// undone, then damaged/ by hand") point to the kind of looping renewal the poems present as a space of possibility. Through the idea of going "back to the woods," these pieces suggest a turn towards viewing "Rupture as a means/ of making." Both epic and personal in scale ("If I had a home/ it would be// a still in a film/ where the sound/ got jammed," she writes in "Shine"), this exquisitely lyrical and unsettling collection charts a way forward by looking back.
