Cynthia Cruz

Cynthia Cruz Poems

Cynthia Cruz Biography

Cynthia Cruz is a contemporary American poet. Her first collection of poems, Ruin, was published by Alice James Books in 2006, and reviewed by The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Library Journal and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Her second collection "The Glimmering Room" published by Four Way Books and launched at the contemporary art gallery Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden, was also reviewed by the New York Times alongside the poet C. K. Williams. She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Guernica and The Paris Review, and in anthologies including Isn't it Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger Poets (Wave Books, 2004), and The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, edited by poet Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press, 2004). She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Princeton University. In 2010 she was the Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton University. Cruz currently teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She has previously taught at the Juilliard School, Fordham University, the Rutgers-Newark MFA Program and Eugene Lang College. Born in Germany, Cruz grew up in northern California, where she earned her B.A. at Mills College. She earned her M.F.A. at Sarah Lawrence College and is currently studying Art Writing & Criticism at the School of Visual Arts. She has published essays, book and art reviews in the LA Review of Books, Hyperallergic, the American Poetry Review, and the Rumpus. She is an art editor at Guernica Magazine. She currently lives in Brooklyn.)

The Best Poem Of Cynthia Cruz

Midnight Office

The child is not dead.
She is sleeping.

Gone from this world
Which is broken.

The angel of Michael
Outside the garden
His circle of fire
Maddening around the tree.

He put the word
Back into her:
A heavy kind of music.

Then she was free.
As we all are.

All night I stood in the icy wind,
Praying for the storm to destroy me.

But the wind blew through me
Like I was a hologram.

If you say I am a mystic,
Then fine: I'm a mystic.

The trees are not trees, anyway.

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