The Never Wife
"I drive into an August tropic rain./ The road's behind a waterfall and I'm/ hunched squinting like a crone/ for signs. Ghosts mark time ..." ("Moving to New Orleans, 1991").
"I am moved by Ms. Hogue's apparent knowledge of people, and by her ability to present them convincingly in her poems. This is a quality all too rare in contemporary poetry, characterized as it is by a nearly universal self-absorption. There is wisdom here, and acute observation of the human situation" — John Haines
Bio
Cynthia Hogue is a professor emeritus of English at Arizona State University, where she held the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry.
Praise for this book
Cynthia Hogue's poems have found a way of touching on and revealing the depths of sorrow without capitulating to glamorous devices or slick ironies ... [She] writes fearlessly into a landscape of no easy answers, but outside the language of judgment.
Kathleen Fraser
In poem after poem ... 'The Never Wife' arrives at wisdom ... with flawless courage. And she does so with such clarity and grace that one is drawn irresistibly into her world ...
Agha Shahid Ali
