Ruin - by Cynthia Cruz (Paperback)

About the Book

This confident, intense debut speaks of ruined childhoods with both terror and tenderness.

Book Synopsis

Reader, take heed: These are no ordinary poems about childhood. In a series of secular prayers, Cynthia Cruz alludes to a girlhood colored by abuse and a brother's death. A beautifully understated sense of menace and damage pervades this vivid, nonlinear tale.

Review Quotes

"Cynthia Cruz's passionate, intense poems inhabit a landscape of fates and fatal hungers, nightmares and dangerous desires, in which enchantment and terror are so intimate that they become one."--Reginald Shepherd

"...the poems in this first collection are almost all passionate and full of energy...Cruz says: 'I spent a lifetime inside the destruction./ And like anyone, I made a world someplace else.' These poems are that world: tough, sometimes hard to swallow, but certainly compelling."--Library Journal

"To enjoy these poems...is to permit the elliptical mind of a poet deeply grieved and disquieted, who is sifting through detritus and artifacts presumably to find reconciliation, or a way to heal."--Small Spiral Notebook

"This is not a book about peacocks in twilight nor should it be read in the parlor. These spare, intense poems are both terrifying and excruciatingly tender, often both at once. Rarely is mystery so lucid, rarely does poetry rush so directly to the marrow. Ruin is a brilliant debut."--Thomas Lux

About the Author

Cynthia Cruz was born in Germany and raised in Northern California. She holds degrees from Mills College (B.A.) and Sarah Lawrence College (M.F.A.), and has received numerous residencies to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries.