paper • 72 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-961897-86-1
eISBN: 978-1-961897-87-8
September 2026 • Poetry
Twilight is the intermediary state of becoming, the suspension between, when one is no longer who one was and not yet who they will be. At the end of psychoanalysis, after one has worked through the symbolic investitures one has been relegated to, one is reduced to such a state. In this state of momentary suspension, one is, in a sense, nothing.
Twilight also names a historical moment, when one world is ending but the next has yet to appear. That we are existing in the suspension between the the end of the world as we have known it and the void of what has yet to come is a commonly repeated truth. Hegel describes twilight as “a flash” that in “a single stroke brings to view the structure of the new world,” suggesting that novelty arises out of darkness and obscurity. We are living, in other words, in a state of twilight.
Cruz’s tenth poetry collection takes the concept of twilight and presents, through a series of elliptical poems, a working through of the term. The speakers in these poems exist within this wavering. As she writes in one of several poems titled “Twilight,” “Twilight, its world between worlds / its miraculous suspension. / I belong to the school of Freud’s / hypothetical boarding school girls. / We wait and we wait / for the world to begin.”
“Twilight”
White porcelain urn from the first Paris
honeymoon. A tiny silver mania
caught, kept, and suspended
in the crypt of its white Dresden
bones. Survival is the remainder
of death, the site where the bright yellow
sliver of birth’s yellow arrow
attempts once again to break in.
Twilight, its world between worlds
its miraculous suspension.
I belong to the school of Freud’s
hypothetical boarding school girls.
We wait and we wait
for the world to begin.
In these highly lyrical, wildly intelligent poems, Cynthia Cruz assembles her considerable poetic powers to demarcate the spaces between what we know and what we feel. Cruz continues the poetic tradition of Mitteleuropa, with its intransigence, its tragedies, and its many ghosts, but she is also the inheritor of the intensities of Hölderlin with his fragments, and of Walser with his urge to capture the feeling of a moment that expands into depth and meaning. Mature, beautiful, and strikingly varied, Twilight is a noteworthy, effecting achievement.
In her recent collection, Cynthia Cruz writes, “Repetition repeats / But also secretes.” Twilight is that secreted substance embodied in elliptical, idiosyncratic poems of troubled turns through the dark glossolalia of transitory spaces filled with secrets, dreams, and collections of uncanny word-things. Twilight is an extraordinary, haunting book.
With what is pain decorated? In the room where it joins the other girls’ pain? Leather, blood, pollen, pearl resin—the images in Cruz’s Twilight smear, becoming a translucent appliqué that glamors and quavers like the surface of a lake. A lake in Europe, under a city. She hears velvet. She speaks anger like an angel.