Books by Cynthia Hogue |
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The Incognito Body In Cynthia Hogue’s new collection, The Incognito Body, the ethical and the metaphysical are struck with the extraordinary, both surreal and, as the twenty-first century violently advances, allegorical. A cast-iron stove simmers in a field of good intentions. A man imprisons stones to teach them the morality he knows he represents. A passenger in transit between flights turns suddenly in fury, shouting obscenities at a complete stranger. In the central, experimental title series meditating on the “gift of illness,” as Kathy Acker wryly put it, the self wakes up one day to discover that the body she had always known has been replaced by an “incognito body” in pain. That “body” becomes in the end an acute consideration of the body politic, leaving the questions Hogue poses to hover and resonate rather than resolve. Hogue’s is an innovative poetics of inquiry and witness, and The Incognito Body strikes subtle balance between the analytic and contemplative lyric, between methods of narrative and assemblage, and finally, between the mundane and the spiritual.
Reviews of The Incognito Body.
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Updated:
June 10, 2013
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