Twilight

Twilight is the intermediary state of becoming, the suspension between, when one is no longer who one was and not yet who they will be. At the end of psychoanalysis, after one has worked through the symbolic investitures one has been relegated to, one is reduced to such a state. In this state of momentary suspension, one is, in a sense, nothing.

Twilight also names a historical moment, when one world is ending but the next has yet to appear. That we are existing in the suspension between the the end of the world as we have known it and the void of what has yet to come is a commonly repeated truth. Hegel describes twilight as “a flash” that in “a single stroke brings to view the structure of the new world,” suggesting that novelty arises out of darkness and obscurity. We are living, in other words, in a state of twilight.

Cruz’s tenth poetry collection takes the concept of twilight and presents, through a series of elliptical poems, a working through of the term. The speakers in these poems exist within this wavering. As she writes in one of several poems titled “Twilight,” “Twilight, its world between worlds / its miraculous suspension. / I belong to the school of Freud’s / hypothetical boarding school girls. / We wait and we wait / for the world to begin.”