Cynthia Hogue
Cynthia Hogue’s tenth poetry collection is instead, it is dark (Red Hen Press, 2023). Her ekphrastic Covid chapbook is entitled Contain (Tram Editions, 2022), and her new collaborative translation from the French of Nicole Brossard is Distantly (Omnidawn, 2022). Among her honors are a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland, two NEA Fellowships, and the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. She served as Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day for September (2022), sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Hogue was the inaugural Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Tucson.
Reading List
To the Sheltering Island
At the time there was a ferry to the island. We walked the shore waiting to board. Even then my body was brewing a pestilence I ignored until I couldn’t. When you say, almost matter-of-factly, Our country’s sick, and the world-spirit’s sick, I remember in my bones the early years I ailed. Now Covid scrapes […]
The Daughter
(France 1943/2013) 1 I witnessed nothing to speak of because we were Free. My life at four was the same as at three. Then whispers wound into my ears, or, Father never whispered – he gave me fire to breathe – all the oxygen lit the room, burning me up until my breath writhed in […]
The Snake
We thought it squashed, a spotty tan tube on dusty asphalt. Still undulate of S – “crushed by the grinding weight of superstition” – unspooled from a sheltering bush along the ditch, camouflaged, noticed just in time. In the distance, mountains dipped in clouds. Somewhere east it rained. Staying me, in “the natural order of […]