Guidebooks for the Dead

In Guidebooks for the Dead, Cynthia Cruz returns to a familiar literary landscape in which a cast of extraordinary women struggle to create amidst violence, addiction and poverty. For Marguerite Duras, evoked here in a collage of poems, the process of renaming herself is a "e;Quiet death,"e; a renewal she envisions as vital to her evolution. In "e;Duras (The Flock),"e; she is "e;high priestess"e; to an imagined assemblage of women writers for whom the word is sustenance and weapon, "e;tiny pills or bullets, each one packed with memory, packed with a multitude of meaning."e; Joining them is the book's speaker, an "e;I"e; who steps forward to declare her rightful place among "e;these ladies with smeared lipstick and torn hosiery. . . this parade of wrong voices."e; Guidebooks for the Dead is both homage to these women and a manifesto for how to survive in a world that seeks to silence those who resist.