Cynthia Cruz

What does it mean to be working-class in a middle-class world? Cynthia Cruz shows us how class affects culture and our mental health and what we can do about it -- calling not for assimilation, but for annihilation. In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz describes with clarity and precision what class is, its various and often nuanced manifestations, and the violence it inflicts upon the working-class while, simultaneously articulating an alternative to assimilation, which can only mean annihilation. Utilizing Freud's concept of melancholia as a starting point, Cruz examines working-class writers, artists, filmmakers and musicians, looking at the melancholia that ensues when the working-class subject leaves her working-class origins to "become someone," only to find that she loses herself in the process.

A Manifesto for the Working Class

The Melancholia of Class

Disquieting: Essays on Silence by Cynthia Cruz is a book of silence and turning away. In these essays, Cruz asks how can we live lives of resistance to the desires and ideologies of contemporary Neoliberal culture. Tarrying with those who turn away, she inhabits connections between mental illness, refusal, silence and Neoliberalism. She explores the experience of being working-class and poor in contemporary culture, and how those who are silenced often turn to forms of disquietude that value open-endedness, complexity, and difficulty. Disquieting draws on philosophy, theory, art, film, and literature to offer alternative ways of being in this world and possibilities for building a new one.

Essays on Silence

Disquieting

A chronicle of the struggle between the opposing worlds of the material and the unseen

How the End Begins

The Glimmering Room

"A slide show in poems documenting the ruin wrought by war and inequality on those who defy the status quo. In Guidebooks for the Dead, Cynthia Cruz returns to a familiar literary landscape in which a cast of extraordinary women struggle to create amidst violence, addiction and poverty. For Marguerite Duras, evoked here in a collage of poems, the process of renaming herself is a "Quiet death," a renewal she envisions as vital to her evolution. In "Duras (The Flock)," she is "high priestess" to an imagined assemblage of women writers for whom the word is sustenance and weapon, "tiny pills or bullets, each one packed with memory, packed with a multitude of meaning." Joining them is the book's speaker, an "I" who steps forward to declare her rightful place among "these ladies with smeared lipstick and torn hosiery . . . this parade of wrong voices." Guidebooks for the Dead is both homage to these women and a manifesto for how to survive in a world that seeks to silence those who resist"--

Guidebooks for the Dead

In Wunderkammer, Cynthia Cruz collects and chronicles "glam and gloom," the darling and the damaged

Wunderkammer

Ruin

A collection of poems constructed like a series of film montages or collages showing what the world looks like now

Dregs

A specter, haunting the edges of society: because neoliberalism insists there are no social classes, thus, there is no working class, the main subject of Hotel Oblivion, a working class subject, does not exist. With no access to a past, she has no home, no history, no memory. And yet, despite all this, she will not assimilate. Instead, this book chronicles the subject's repeated attempts at locating an exit from capitalist society via acts of negative freedom and through engagement with the death drive, whose aim is complete destruction in order to begin all over again. In the end, of course, the only true exit and only possibility for emancipation for the working class subject is through a return to one's self. In Hotel Oblivion, through a series of fragments and interrelated poems, Cruz resists invisibilizing forces, undergoing numerous attempts at transfiguration in a concerted effort to escape her fate.

Hotel Oblivion

Latina poets occupy an important place in today's literary landscape. Coming from diverse backgrounds, they share an understanding of what it means to exist within the margins of society. As artists, they possess a dedication to their craft and a commitment to experimentation. Their voices--sometimes lyrical, sometimes autobiographical, sometimes politically charged--are distinctly female. Whereas previous anthologies have merged the works of Latino and Latina poets, this collection is the first to showcase Latina poetry on its own terms. For years readers have admired the poetry of prominent Latina authors Cherrie Moraga, Ana Castillo, and Sandra Cisneros. Building on their inspirational legacy, Other Musics heralds a new generation of Latina poets whose work blends traditional forms and styles with postmodern innovations. These poets do not fit neatly into one category. They come from all walks of life, from remarkably varied class, ethnic, occupational, and educational backgrounds. Their topics and concerns are wide-ranging. All of the poets, according to volume editor Cynthia Cruz, are creating "a new kind of music," one that embraces the "in-between" and bicultural world that Latina women must constantly straddle. The fifteen poets featured in this anthology are Desirée Alvarez, Karen Bradway, Xochiquetzal Candelaria, Diana Maria Delgado, Natalie Diaz, Carolina Ebeid, Sandy Florian, Carrie Fountain, Leticia Hernández-Linares, Ada Limón, Sheryl Luna, Kristin Naca, Deborah Paredez, Emmy Pérez, and Carmen Giménez Smith. Along with an ample selection of each of their poetry, Other Musics features an artist statement by each poet, in which she discusses her work, her writing practice, how she became a writer, and her views on the purpose and mission of poetry in the contemporary world.

New Latina Poetry

Other Musics

Latina poets occupy an important place in today’s literary landscape. Coming from diverse backgrounds, they share an understanding of what it means to exist within the margins of society. As artists, they possess a dedication to their craft and a commitment to experimentation. Their voices—sometimes lyrical, sometimes autobiographical, sometimes politically charged—are distinctly female. Whereas previous anthologies have merged the works of Latino and Latina poets, this collection is the first to showcase Latina poetry on its own terms. For years readers have admired the poetry of prominent Latina authors Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, and Sandra Cisneros. Building on their inspirational legacy, Other Musics heralds a new generation of Latina poets whose work blends traditional forms and styles with postmodern innovations. These poets do not fit neatly into one category. They come from all walks of life, from remarkably varied class, ethnic, occupational, and educational backgrounds. Their topics and concerns are wide-ranging. All of the poets, according to volume editor Cynthia Cruz, are creating “a new kind of music,” one that embraces the “in-between” and bicultural world that Latina women must constantly straddle. The fifteen poets featured in this anthology are Desirée Alvarez, Karen Bradway, Xochiquetzal Candelaria, Diana Maria Delgado, Natalie Diaz, Carolina Ebeid, Sandy Florian, Carrie Fountain, Leticia Hernández-Linares, Ada Limón, Sheryl Luna, Kristin Naca, Deborah Paredez, Emmy Pérez, and Carmen Giménez Smith. Along with an ample selection of each of their poetry, Other Musics features an artist statement by each poet, in which she discusses her work, her writing practice, how she became a writer, and her views on the purpose and mission of poetry in the contemporary world.

Cynthia Cruz

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