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 &quote;Quiet death,&quote; a renewal she envisions as vital to her evolution. In &quote;Duras (The Flock),&quote; she is &quote;high priestess&quote; to an imagined assemblage of women writers for whom the word is sustenance and weapon, &quote;tiny pills or bullets, each one packed with memory, packed with a multitude of meaning.&quote; Joining them is the book's speaker, an &quote;I&quote; who steps forward to declare her rightful place among &quote;these ladies with smeared lipstick and torn hosiery. . . this parade of wrong voices.&quote; 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.