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thebeardedpoet's review against another edition
4.0
Guidebooks for the Dead as a collection works very well for me, as someone who has read all of Cynthia Cruz's collections and her recent book of essays, Silence. I appreciate Guidebooks as a capstone work in the vein Cruz has been working through since the beginning. The individual pieces here could be baffling on their own, but if you see the collection as an entire work, it hangs together beautifully. I'll have to give it some further thought, but what occurred to me is that Guidebooks for the Dead could be compared to The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot as long poem with movements and thematic threads. If you really want to fully appreciate what Cruz is doing here, also see her essay collection Silence. There she explores how poverty and marginalization are expressed in art (and in metal illness) as silence and how surrealism and collage can be used to express the experience of those who suffer in silence. All those techniques are on display here. It is my plan to re-read all of Cynthia Cruz's work sometime in the near future with the perspective gained from the essays and from this collection.
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