Manifest

Poetry. Winner of the 2011 Gatewood Prize selected by Harryette Mullen. MANIFEST makes me stop reading and recite poems to whoever is sitting next to me, be it a friend, a stranger, or a tinfoil factory. It's not only the beauty of the images and lines, the engrossing narratives, or the polished syntax and music; it's the power of Cynthia Arrieu-King's attention. The chaos of interiority finds logic in both the rhetoric of the image and the mathematics of the sentence, while the chaos of exteriority is translated through mediations and also capricious signifiers. It welcomes me into a world I did not know I knew.--Mathias Svalina

Cosmopolitan, full of wilderness, immensely attentive, and dangerously funny, the poems in Cynthia Arrieu-King's second book MANIFEST are beautifully self-possessed even as they operate far above usual ideas of self. This is a book of secrets. Reading it has changed me. It has opened me up to the secrets in each moment of being alive.--Laura Cronk