Following her husband’s massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to discover if there were more such memories in her extended family in France.
Contain
As much as human beings were made to stay inside their homes in many places, pulled back like the awkward weeds we can be, threatened with culling by the mind of the garden, we were, in that way, contained by the pandemic.
In June the Labyrinth
Hogue strikes a profound chord in this elliptical sequence; ‘you will not get lost,’ though ‘you will feel lost,’ she explains, as she leads us on a quest for healing, forgiveness, and love.--Wendy Barker
Revenance
Revenant is “ghost” in French, and in her eighth collection, Revenance, Cynthia Hogue coins a word to consider large questions of life and afterlife.
Or Consequence
The poems in Cynthia Hogue’s collection, Or Consequence, range from meditations on “freedom” to poems crossing cultural and formal boundaries.
When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina
Poet Cynthia Hogue and photographer Rebecca Ross convey the experience of a cross section of evacuees, their journeys from the Gulf Coast to the Arizona desert, and their efforts to make new lives.
The Incognito Body
In the title series meditating on the “gift of illness,” the self wakes up one day to find that her body has been replaced by an “incognito body” in pain.
Flux
In the tradition of Dickinson and H.D., Flux opens out into visionary language and the never-ending search for transcendence.
The Never Wife
"In poem after poem...The Never Wife arrives at wisdom...with flawless courage." -Agha Shahid Ali
The Woman in Red
In this collection of narrative poetry, Cynthia Hogue layers dream-like images over one another to convey a sense of what it means to be a woman.