Or Consequence

Red Hen Press, 2010

An innovative poetics of inquiry and outrage, love and hope in the twenty-first century.

Such subjects are brought to bear on language as excavation and reclamation in Hogue’s central section, a discrete series entitled “Under Erasure/ Ars Cora,” after the last slave, Cora Arsene, to use the courts to sue for freedom on the eve of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.

In the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Hogue’s poem cycle meditates on traces: traces of a lost life, of a presence that has been erased, part of the palimpsest that is post-Katrina New Orleans (a city in which Hogue once lived). In the case of Cora Arsene, Hogue finds such a trace lying unnoticed, forgotten, but sign of a dynamic, courageous presence that persists. These poems invoke this presence in classic lyric strategy, but not to reembody the lost but to follow the trace’s thread from the real to the sublime. Hogue’s is an innovative poetics of inquiry, an analytic lyric striking a balance between method and music, collage and image, and finally, between violence and that other ancient human capacity, love.

Praise for Or Consequence:

“Always a pioneer, with Or Consequence Cynthia Hogue enters new realms of visionary, speculative intelligence. She has become a student of “nubilous, light-flecked water,” of consciousness as ontological and historical field. Her brilliantly complex poems vibrate with the absorptions and surprise of unbidden confrontations. They are supremely attentive fictions, awake to the reciprocities of love, power, karma, listening, trust, and memory, accountable to the expansive transformations of generosity and the most nuanced particulates of thought and feeling.

“Consequence” broadens to include the gap between cause and effect, intention and expression, a terrain so ample it embraces pathos, tragedy, exaltation, and even comic associations as phrases eroded by use are rewired and weirded into freshness. This is a poetry of conscience, but Hogue’s witnessing is delicate rather than didactic, rich with insurrections of mind and language. She is, moreover, an intensely visual poet whose subtle and various use of white space recalls the many forms of emptiness enumerated in Buddhism. I can think of no recent book that better suggests the turbulent and sublime possibilities of poetry.”

Alice Fulton

More Praise for Or Consequence

“Cynthia Hogue finessing her materials with such wishful genius, chiasmically asking the pure questions: how to create space upon habitually imbruted ground, all the while Beauty, in an arched fold awaits us.”

Lissa Wolsak

“With Or Consequence a gentleness is thrust into the clamor which does not diminish the firmness wherein these lines lie in waiting, asserting the historical record here, imagining the human options there: ‘Upon which so much.’”

C.D. Wright

“A poem’s intimate room needs to stand ajar, signals beamed in and conversation spilling into the halls. Hogue’s poetics of generosity is so thoughtfully, deftly framed that she actually manages it.”

Lesley Wheeler, Shenandoah

“Enticing, endearing, and evocative.”

Anna Leahy, The American Book Review

Reviews

Review: Cynthia Hogue’s ‘Or Consequence’” in Fogged Clarity”

Scott Hightower reviews Cynthia Hogue’s Or Consequence in the arts review, Fogged Clarity (April 2011). According to Hightower, Hogue is “a poet of extreme precision and no histrionics.”

Wandering Spirit: ASU’s Cynthia Hogue is haunted and inspired by time spent in New Orleans” (Tucson Weekly)”

In the lead-up to the 2011 Tucson Book Festival, Jarret Keene published this review of Cynthia Hogue’s Or Consequence–in the Tucson Weekly (10 March 2011).