Second Childhood by Fanny Howe
Cynthia Cruz reviews Fanny Howe's Second Childhood today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Cynthia Cruz
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Cynthia Cruz’s poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and others. Her first collection of poems, RUIN, was published by Alice James Books, and her second collection, The Glimmering Room, was published by Four Way Books in the fall of 2012. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. Her third collection of poems, Wunderkammer, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2014. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
I Did Not Vanish: On Writing
But writing poems allows me mastery over a miniature universe. For those moments or hours, I am God of my kingdom. No one tells me how things go. No one can argue against me when I’m writing poems. When I am writing, I get to speak.
On Reading
So deep into this other world do I drop, I no longer notice, nor do I care, what’s happening outside the book, in the “real” world. Like a drug, the book seduces me. I can’t resist.
Across the Land and the Water by W. G. Sebald
In Sebald’s Across the Land and Water, the theme is clear. In these collections, we have named men and women (names) traveling, staying in hotels, unanchored, exiled and lost, seemingly forever, from their home.