These poems are unblinking in the face of dark subject matter, and surprising in their capacity for hope, for grace. "Cynthia Huntington’s Heavenly Bodies is a fearless and exacting exploration of illness, addiction, abuse, and the waning of American idealism. "Huntington.does not go easy on the reader. Again and again she comes back to the images of the drug-addled, the lost, the repressed, or the rebel, finding subtle new ways to reconfigure their place in a cold, distant society that seems content to view them as lesser than what they are.Her 'heavenly bodies' are those women who are strong when others might find them to be weak, 'sinners' whose 'sin' is merely the rejection of that which degrades them."- Larry Nolen, OF Blog Univeristy Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools 2013 editionįinalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, 2012 At the center is the semiautobiographical Suzy Creamcheese, sensual and rebellious, both almighty and powerless in her sexuality.Īchingly tender yet brutally honest, Heavenly Bodies is an unflinching reflection on the most personal of physical and emotional journeys. Jinns and aliens beckon while cities burn and revolutionaries thunder for change. Echoing throughout are some of the most famous-and infamous-voices of the times: Joan Baez and Charles Manson, Frank Zappa and Betty Friedan. Heavenly Bodies is a testament to the duality of sex, the twin seductiveness and horror of drug addiction, and the social, political, and personal dramas of America in the 1960s.įrom the sweetness of purloined blackberries to the bitter taste of pills, the ginger perfume of the Hawaiian Islands to the scream of the winter wind, Huntington’s fearless and candid poems offer a feast for the senses that is at once mystical and earthy, cynical and surreal. In this blistering collection of lyric poems, Cynthia Huntington gives an intimate view of the sexual revolution and rebellion in a time before the rise of feminism.
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