instead, it is dark
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Following her husband’s massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to discover if there were more such memories in her extended family in France. When asked, family members told her never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable—of a hidden child. Hogue spent years researching the lives of civilians during war, work crystallized in her tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark. The personal is alchemized as Hogue weaves history and present day in poems that explore how there, here, an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry, speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of this collection—love.
Described in the New York Times as having “a knack for intensity,” Cynthia Hogue has published twenty books of poetry, translations, and criticism, including such volumes from Red Hen Press as Revenance and In June the Labyrinth. She is co-author of When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina (interview-poems with photographs by Rebecca Ross), named a Notable Book by Poetry International. Revenance was listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets. Hogue’s honors include two NEA Fellowships and the H.D. Fellowship at Yale. She lives in Tucson, AZ.