Cynthia Hogue - Böcker

Uses post structuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories to read the poetry of Dickinson, Moore, H.D., and Rich.Scheming Women charts a trajectory of American female poetic speakers from within a heterosexual lyric framework to bisexual and lesbian subjects outside that pervasive frame. In close readings of Dickinson, Moore, H.D., and Rich, the author makes a new argument about the division that permeates their poetic speaking subjects. Postulating a revolutionary female subject, she extends Julia Kristeva's theory of poetic language through an intertextual approach, and shows that these relatively advantaged female poets destructure the very poetic power they are able to assert. Hogue concludes that in not reproducing positions of dominance and privilege indicative of larger cultural trends, these key poets exemplify important alternatives to class, race, and gender hierarchies-persuasively demonstrating the promise of what she terms an ethical feminist poetic practice.

Never before published, The Sword Went Out to Seais the first book in H.D.'s prose trilogy that continues with White Rose and the Red and concludes with The Mystery. This complex, semi-autobiographical novel combines H.D.'s interest in the occult and experiences during the Blitz, and sheds light on the aesthetics and origins of literary modernism.

Physical and emotional pain, internal scarring, and explorations of social illness color the poems of this collection with hauntingly honest accounts, simultaneously filling readers with both a sense of hope and of surrender.

In her stunning ninth collection of poetry, In June the Labyrinth, Cynthia Hogue tells a deeply personal lyric of love andloss through a mythic story. This book-length serial poem follows Elle, a dying woman, as she travels a trans-historical, trans-geographical terrain on a quest to investigate the labyrinth not only as myth and symbol, but something akin to the “labyrinth of the broken heart.” At the heart of Elle’s individual story is the earnest female pilgrim’s journey, full of disappointment but also hard-won wisdom and courage—inspired by Hogue’s own composited experience with loss, in particular the death of her mother. Rooted in the idea of the labyrinth as a symbol for life, as in the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe that Hogue would visit the summer of her mother’s death, these poems above all distill, fracture, recompose, and tell only partially—literally in parts but also in loving detail—the story of a life.

The poems in Cynthia Hogue's collection, Or Consequence, range from meditations on "freedom" to poems crossing cultural and formal boundaries. The first and third sections introduce a series of informal etudes, which contemplate timeless aspects of human experience (love, power, memory, trust, war and peace). Such subjects are brought to bear on language as excavation and reclamation in Hogue's central section, a discrete series entitled "Under Erasure/ Ars Cora," after the last slave, Cora Arsene, to use the courts to sue for freedom on the eve of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. In the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Hogue's poem cycle meditates on traces: traces of a lost life, of a presence that has been erased, part of the palimpsest that is post-Katrina New Orleans (a city in which Hogue once lived). In the case of Cora Arsene, Hogue finds such a trace lying unnoticed, forgotten, but sign of a dynamic, courageous presence that persists. These poems invoke this presence in classic lyric strategy, but not to reembody the lost but to follow the trace's thread from the real to the sublime. Hogue's is an innovative poetics of inquiry, an analytic lyric striking a balance between method and music, collage and image, and finally, between violence and that other ancient human capacity, love.

By turns elegiac, ecopoetic, and impolitic, Cynthia Hogue’s eighth collection, Revenance, is a condensery of empathic encounters with others and otherness. Hogue coins a word—from revenant, French for ‘ghost’—to consider questions of life and afterlife, and to characterize the ways in which the people and places we love return to us, and return us to ourselves, holding us to account. The poems of Revenance contain telling touchstone figures, like a guide named Blake who, noting signs of global warming, will speak of spirits but not angels; a man who dies and is brought back to life by the imaginative power of love; and a woman who can speak the language of endangered trees. While writing these poems, Hogue journeyed often across country to her familial roots in upstate New York in order to help care for her dying father. At last she began to record some of the many stories she heard of mysterious encounters and visitations, such as she herself was soon to witness, over several intensive years. Although grief silvers the threads of these poems, Hogue pares away the personal in order to be present to others in a fiercely engaged and innovative poetry.

A bilingual collection of poems that offers a surreal perspective of urban experience.  This bilingual edition of Nicole Brossard’s lyrical poetry is a sequence of lush, taut cityscapes. Known for her elliptical and materially grounded poetics, Brossard creates an intimate series of poems drawn loosely from urban experience. The poems comprise an evocative distillation of postmodern urban life with a sharp sense of cultural and gendered histories of violence and beauty and struggles for survival and intimacy. The poems capture the emotional and ecological surroundings of each city and its people. The cities in Brossard’s poems feel surreal and in them dwell survivors of “misfortunes,” living in urban landscapes with their “gleaming debris” and “bridges, ghats, / rivers in a time of peace and torture.” These poems gesture toward a transmuted social context and toward a quest “to meet the horizon the day after the horizon.”

Following her husband’s massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to discover if there were more such memories in her extended family in France. When asked, family members told her never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable—of a hidden child. Hogue spent years researching the lives of civilians during war, work crystallized in her tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark. The personal is alchemized as Hogue weaves history and present day in poems that explore how there, here, an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry, speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of this collection—love.