{"product_id":"smith-carmen-gimenez-cruel-futupb","title":"Smith, Carmen Giménez: Cruel Futures","description":"\u003cp\u003eCity Lights Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: March 27, 2018\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: 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.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePraise for Cruel Futures:\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eGiménez Smith seeks release from the pressures of societal expectations in this collection of brief yet powerful poems. ... Giménez Smith's crisp lyrics and imagery highlight ever-present threats to female personhood and autonomy.--Publishers Weekly\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eCruel 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\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eIn 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, Giménez 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\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eDeclamatory 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 Giménez Smith's lyric attention: full of grit, sharp and knowing.--Hoa Nguyen\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40534857580567,"sku":"9780872867581","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_59ef9b24-bb58-41c7-825b-c771891dfdfc.gif?v=1679779102","url":"https:\/\/open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com\/products\/smith-carmen-gimenez-cruel-futupb","provider":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","version":"1.0","type":"link"}