In the dusk of the lyrical space, both liminal and lingering, Twilight writes of and within various forms of suspension. These poems are surreal and cerebral, a psychoanalytic photograph of paradox wherein Cynthia Cruz explores the impossible temporality of trauma: arrested in the moment of wounding, recursion makes of the present an eternity and a foregone conclusion.  The speaker floats in the aspic, transparent but holding fast, of late-stage capitalist America; she wanders through the dreamscapes and feverish visions of her childhood and her unconscious; and she inhabits the Freudian thought experiment of a girls’ boarding school infected by mass hysteria, ghosting from room to room in a building that never truly existed but formed the blueprint of the epistemes that would define the human experience and pathologize certain emotional responses throughout the 20th century and well beyond it.  

Organized around its shattering, this book embraces madness as a modality for conscious liberation. Through the scattered placement of identically titled poems (“Twilight” and “Weltempfänger (World Receiver)”), Cruz models a dialectic through which negation of a sane, discrete identity delivers us to reincarnation, an authentic selfhood unbound by the material constraints of capitalism and one with everyone. Twilight articulates the psychic veil: the boundary between light and dark, conscious and unconscious, reality and dream, stitching together the fractal transmissions Cruz gleans through the airspace of the doorway she has pried open for as long as she is willing to stand in the gap. 

Cynthia Cruz is the author of nine collections of poems, two collections of critical essays, and one novella. Cruz is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell, as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. Cruz earned a BA in English Literature at Mills College, an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts, an MA in German Language and Literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and a PhD from the European Graduate School, where she wrote her dissertation on Hegel and madness.