Cynthia Cruz's Mesmerizing Wunderkammer

At The Rumpus, Diana Whitney reviews Cynthia Cruz's third book, Wunderkammer (Four Way Books 2014), which features for its cover a photograph of James Joyce's daughter, Lucia Joyce, dancing at Bullier Ball in Paris, 1929 (she died in 1982 in an institution). Whitney feels "oddly elated" while reading the poems. More on that:

The power of Wunderkammer lies in the sheer gorgeousness of language combined with leaps of imagination and fearless psychic revelation. Cruz chooses beautiful sounds for terrible things, layering assonance in the book’s opening poem, for example— “Was found drowned in a cream velvet/Mini gown…”— and playfully rhyming “guillotine” with “dream” and “coconut cream” in the final Nebenwelt. Her poems have a wry sense of humor that tempers the traumas they reveal. With delicious and exacting detail, the childlike speaker begins her surreal story:

After I licked clean the saucers
Of Schlag and ceiling-high cream cakes,
I ran twelve miles in my ballet leotard
Through the German forest of snow.
How do I feel about my botched suicide?
Lacing up my skating boots, I
Vanish, silvery paste of vapor on the ice.
- “Nebenwelt”

Cruz was born in Germany and an old-world European landscape permeates many of her poems: images of sanitariums, palanquins, chateaus, Dresden porcelain, French macaroons, and repeatedly, Berlin. Yet the book also travels through a sordid 21st century American geography, from the “all-night/ AA disco” to “the Greyhound/ Station bathroom” to the “Hotel Hilton pool” in upstate New York. In “Kingdom of Cluttering Sorrow,” the speaker is driven in a beige Mercedes “…across the dead/ Zones and bridges/ Of America, its eternal labyrinths,/ Interlocked, and without meaning.”

Inside these labyrinths lies the dark clutter of history, tales of terror and suicide. Starting with Lucia Joyce on the cover, Wunderkammer is haunted by beautiful dead women and the specter of madness—Marilyn Monroe and Ophelia make their blonde appearances, along with the stylistic ghost of Plath. Like Plath, Cruz has mastered the surprising and often ecstatic death image, her fragments punctuated with short, capitalized lines: in “Death Song,” the moon is “A dark, death/ Lick” and the speaker buried under the earth whirrs “like a wheel/ Of bees.”

Read the full review at The Rumpus.