Overview

Cruel Futures is a witchy confessional and wildly imagistic volume that examines subjects as divergent as Alzheimers, Medusa, mumblecore, and mental illness in sharp-witted, taut poems dense with song. Chronicling life on an endangered planet, in a country on the precipice of profound change compelled by a media machine that produces our realities, the book is a high-energy analysis of popular culture, as well as an exploration of the many social roles that women occupy as mother, daughter, lover, and the resulting struggle to maintain personhood-all in a late capitalist America. Praise for Cruel Futures: ""Gimenez Smith seeks release from the pressures of societal expectations in this collection of brief yet powerful poems. ... Gimenez Smith's crisp lyrics and imagery highlight ever-present threats to female personhood and autonomy.""-Publishers Weekly ""Cruel Futures is one of those rare books, rare pieces of art, that manages to be extremely intimate, vulnerable and close while also doing a kind of searing cultural critique. The poems can be tender or ironic, and sometimes a blending of the two, which is not easy.""-Ross Gay ""In the body, through the lyric, and twitching with every sense of the word 'nerve,' this book sings a mongrel nation into and across its cruel futures. Like Neruda in his Plenos Poderes/Full Powers, Gimenez Smith has all the mastery she needs to cast a cold eye on her positioning, and ours. In this way Cruel Futures is an autobiography that won't stay in its genre or premise, caring less to author a self than to follow turns of magic in words that might soothe our 'collisions with the living.'""-Farid Matuk ""Declamatory anthems to no nation, these songs stride as they deal and wheel with skin and kin: history, catastrophe, the body, love. 'Upturned and defiant, all types of shade, no outskirt, / vital like a saint,' the poems in Cruel Futures shimmer with Gimenez Smith's lyric attention: full of grit, sharp and knowing.""-Hoa Nguyen

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9780872867581

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Reviews

Gim nez Smith seeks release from the pressures of societal expectations in this collection of brief yet powerful poems. She depicts the myriad ways that a woman's sense of self is at the mercy of assigned gender roles. ... She links the concept of becoming a 'monster' to women's defiance of prescribed roles, their need to break out of which makes them dangerous ... Cultural phenomena such as marriage and television come under scrutiny, and she handles mental illness issues with great care, particularly bipolar disorder and dementia. Gim nez Smith's crisp lyrics and imagery highlight ever-present threats to female personhood and autonomy. --Publishers Weekly In Carmen Gim nez Smith's Cruel Futures, it's clear she is not interested in the kind of static attention one associates with William Wordsworth's definition of poetry as 'emotion recollected in tranquillity.' Instead Gim nez Smith has places to go and then to take off from again, in the form, mainly, of social and political critiques. Although her poems achieve a certain velocity, she still manages to delve into volcanic meaning and bask in the mirror of self-reflection. To truly relish her talent is to understand her intellect as one of those plasma balls that lights up with bolts of electricity when one's hand touches it. The speakers in her poems are charming, self-deprecating, humorous, and awed, especially when they portray what life is like as a mother, a wife, an artist, and a consumer of popular culture and literature. Because Gim nez Smith experiments with a thicker set of references and inferential imagery than most, poems such as 'Of Property, ' 'As Body, ' and 'Ravers Having Babies' seem to outpace whatever triggered their origin, and she almost always arrives at pure lyric possession. --Major Jackson, American Poets [I]t's Smith's control of the line, the lyric, her use of compression, wry humor, and pointed candor that makes the book's captivation one that truly endures. She delves into familial issues: child-rearing; sick, aging parents; and mental health with care and magnanimous transparency. Cruel Futures is an insurmountable labor that Smith has carved from a world of grief, but retains love and humor that renders her devotion a masterpiece. --The Arkansas International

Gimenez Smith seeks release from the pressures of societal expectations in this collection of brief yet powerful poems. She depicts the myriad ways that a woman's sense of self is at the mercy of assigned gender roles. ... She links the concept of becoming a `monster' to women's defiance of prescribed roles, their need to break out of which makes them dangerous ... Cultural phenomena such as marriage and television come under scrutiny, and she handles mental illness issues with great care, particularly bipolar disorder and dementia. Gimenez Smith's crisp lyrics and imagery highlight ever-present threats to female personhood and autonomy. -Publishers Weekly

Gim'nez Smith seeks release from the pressures of societal expectations in this collection of brief yet powerful poems. She depicts the myriad ways that a woman's sense of self is at the mercy of assigned gender roles. ... She links the concept of becoming a 'monster' to women's defiance of prescribed roles, their need to break out of which makes them dangerous ... Cultural phenomena such as marriage and television come under scrutiny, and she handles mental illness issues with great care, particularly bipolar disorder and dementia. Gim'nez Smith's crisp lyrics and imagery highlight ever-present threats to female personhood and autonomy. --Publishers Weekly Gimenez Smith seeks release from the pressures of societal expectations in this collection of brief yet powerful poems. She depicts the myriad ways that a woman's sense of self is at the mercy of assigned gender roles. ... She links the concept of becoming a 'monster' to women's defiance of prescribed roles, their need to break out of which makes them dangerous ... Cultural phenomena such as marriage and television come under scrutiny, and she handles mental illness issues with great care, particularly bipolar disorder and dementia. Gimenez Smith's crisp lyrics and imagery highlight ever-present threats to female personhood and autonomy. --Publishers Weekly

Author Information

Carmen Gimenez Smith received a BA in English at San Jose State University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of four poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She was awarded an American Book Award for her memoir Bring Down the Little Birds (2010) and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for Goodbye, Flicker (2012). She also co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (2014), an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing. Be Recorder will be published by Graywolf Press in 2019. She now serves on the planning committee for CantoMundo and on the board of RASA, which sponsors the Thinking Its Presence conference on race and art. She serves as the publisher of Noemi Press. She is a professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech and the poetry editor for The Nation.

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