Wunderkammer was a finalist for Foreword Reviews’ 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award in Poetry. 

Wunderkammer

Cynthia Cruz

Within the world of Wunderkammer, or “cabinet of curiosities,” Cynthia Cruz archives the ruinous, the sparkling, the traumatic, and the decadent. These poems, through sensuous impressions, mimic what it’s like to wake from a dream only to realize you are still inside the dream. We encounter gluttony pinned against starvation—“ceiling high cream cakes, / I ran twelve miles in my ballet leotard” and the glamorous mixed with the grotesque —“I follow a sequin / Thread of dead things.” Through “brutal music,” Wunderkammer grips at the edges of memory and chaos; these poems have “found the kill / And entered it.”

“Self Portrait in Fox Furs, with Magic,” from Wunderkammer:

Where I am the weather is
Spectacular damage, and hustle.

And inside my tiny Berlin,
I am packed, already, in a casket

To be returned in a pearl-
Studded palanquin 

With no music. Beneath the blood 
And rattle, I saw the moon 

Float over a field 
Of white horses, a blind king 

Whispering in Old German. 
They'll hook the gloomed world 

Back into me, its menageries 
And zoos of wounds, its museums 

Of memory, and trauma. In the city 
Of palaces, I lived 

Inside a doll house 
Mansion, Chateau Feral, 

Chateau Bloodhound. 
Deep inside the primordial forest. 

I was born 
On its warm floor 

Inside the murk of the underworld, 
And filled, at birth, with a green ocean of terror.