Or Consequence

(Paperback)

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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 bea

Reviews

Always a pioneer, with Or Consequence Cynthia Hogue enters new realms of visionary, speculative intelligence. She has become a student of "nubilous, light-flecked water," of consciousness as ontological and historical field. Her brilliantly complex poems vibrate with the absorptions and surprise of unbidden confrontations. They are supremely attentive fictions, awake to the reciprocities of love, power, karma, listening, trust, and memory, accountable to the expansive transformations of generosity and the most nuanced particulates of thought and feeling. "Consequence" broadens to include the gap between cause and effect, intention and expression, a terrain so ample it embraces pathos, tragedy, exaltation, and even comic associations as phrases eroded by use are rewired and weirded into freshness. This is a poetry of conscience, but Hogue's witnessing is delicate rather than didactic, rich with insurrections of mind and language. She is, moreover, an intensely visual poet whose subtle and various use of white space recalls the many forms of emptiness enumerated in Buddhism. I can think of no recent book that better suggests the turbulent and sublime possibilities of poetry. --Alice Fulton

Cynthia Hogue finessing her materials with such wishful genius, chiasmically asking the pure questions: how to create space upon habitually imbruted ground, all the while Beauty, in an arched fold awaits us. --Lissa Wolsak

With Or Consequence a gentleness is thrust into the clamor which does not diminish the firmness wherein these lines lie in waiting, asserting the historical record here, imagining the human options there: "Upon which so much." -C.D. Wright

Author Bio

Cynthia Hogue has published five previous collections of poetry, including The Incognito Body (Red Hen Press 2006). She is the co-editor of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (2006), and of the first edition of H.D.'s The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton (2007). She has received Fulbright, NEA (poetry), and NEH (Summer Seminar) Fellowships. In 2005, she was awarded the H.D. Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and in 2007, a MacDowell Colony Residency Fellowship. In 2008, she was awarded an Arizona Commission on the Arts Artists Project Grant for a multigenre project of interviews with Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Hogue taught in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans before moving to Pennsylvania, where she directed the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University for eight years. While in Pennsylvania, she trained in conflict resolution with the Mennonites and became a trained mediator specializing in diversity issues in education. In 2003, she joined the Department of English at Arizona State University as the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry.