BOOKS
An occasion for celebration, Cynthia Good’s lively and enlivening new collection dazzles with lyric precision, emotional control and lucid beauty. Good’s observations about the natural world and the life of the body are delicious with detail and gritty with the wisdom of a life lived deeply and well.
—Deborah Landau, author of Skeletons
Cynthia Good’s poems beautifully and roughly navigate all of life’s travails—grief, love, the body, motherhood, daughterhood. These poems are imagistic, lyrically plain spoken, and wise.
—Victoria Chang, author of The Trees Witness Everything
Without being too dogmatic, Cynthia Good’s IN THE THAW OF DAY moves from the past to the present in a way that leaves the reader in touch with a melancholy and beautiful planet that has room, if only briefly, for everything.
—Matthew Rohrer, author of The Sky Contains the Plans
“I have been waiting for a collection from Cynthia Good. And here it is! So exciting.”
—Camille T. Dungy, author of Trophic Cascade and Soil
“Cynthia Good's debut chapbook, What We Do with Our Hands, is a shimmering map of vulnerability and resilience. Like human antennae, the speaker is exquisitely tuned to love and its disappointments, to the eros of the material world and its impermanence. These brief lyric poems slalom between ‘humor, desire, and degradation’ with ease and surprising turns that carry us from ‘nude selfies and saliva,’ past a ‘lit green awning’ to a very human cry: ‘Don't objectify me. Please / Objectify me, in the bone / Cold scent of piss on Rue Jacob.’ Good's is a world where ‘the rocks bear witness to our brevity’ and still ‘the music kept coming—like tomorrow.’”
—Catherine Barnett, author of Human Hours, The Game of Boxes, and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced
“Cynthia Good’s poems cut straight to the bone, not with a machete or dull-edged sword, but with a scalpel and deft hand like only the best poets can do. These poems are alive with well-earned grit. Every line is brimming with what it means to be alive in the grandest sense of the word—these poems say, “I lived through this, and you can too.”
—Travis Denton, author of When Pianos Fall From the Sky and My Stunt Double