STILL-LIFE WITH GOD
published by Saint Julian Press, March 2020
http://saintjulianpress.com/cynthia-atkins.html
Preorders available through Barnes and Noble, Amazon,
Indiebound and your local bookstores:
Indiebound
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781733023306
Barnes and Noble
https://m.barnesandnoble.com/w/still-life-with-god
-cynthia-atkins/1135161348
Houston, Texas—November 18, 2019—Press Release:
Saint Julian Press is proud to announce a new book of poetry. Still-Life With God, by author Cynthia Atkins, will be available for preorder in December 2019, and on March 11, 2020. In Still-Life With God, Cynthia Atkins excavates and studies the spiritual life, a bold cautionary tale of the plight of the self to question our destiny and our place in the world. The poet addresses questions of gender, body, mental health/illness, gun violence and a search for the divine. With a wide psychological net and narrative depth, she renders coming of age, adulthood, motherhood, womanhood, and self-hood.
Traci Brimhall—
Author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
“In Cynthia Atkins' Still-Life With God, the material world becomes a rubric for faith, all its threats and losses a constant test for what we believe in and what we can bear. With packed lyricism and astonishing leaps, Atkins studies how easily God manifests as a new object in our lives, and how quickly the mutable self, starts becoming an image that can be ‘shared and liked.’ Although the dangers of the world sear through everything, there’s also a reverence for the 'exquisite human machine of pathos and debris.' Just as a door compels us to knock, these poems make you sit up, astonished, a little wild with awe."
Matthew Olzmann—
Author of Contradictions in the Design
“'Every day is triage,’ writes Cynthia Atkins, and indeed Still-Life with God is full of damage and ache, but also a spirit willing to look for something holy where such things are difficult to find. Here, God is a wishing well, a medicine cabinet, a bullet, and an alibi. These are sharp, bold poems by a poet unafraid to search for the divine, and unafraid to tell you what that search might yield."
Kelli Russell Agodon—
Author of Hourglass Museum and The Daily Poet
“Cynthia Atkins’ Still-Life With God confronts our world with a large open heart. Spiritual, emotional, creative, and technological, Atkins’ thoughtful narrative brings us into precise moments where 'train whistles/record the distance of our loneliness and a boy is sailing/a paper airplane into the vast/ stratosphere of science and love.' How could one not read poems with titles like, 'The Internet Is The Loneliest Place On The Planet, God Is A Treasure Hunt, and Dear Art'— and present, the self and the self-portrait, help us all find our own place a little easier in the whole and the divine. A beautiful collection to hold."
IN THE EVENT OF FULL DISCLOSURE
Publisher: http://www.readcwbooks.com/atkins-disclosure.html
To order: http://www.amazon.com/Event-Full-Disclosure-Cynthia-Atkins/dp/162549033X
"'I've faked it and faked it well./ I hear our ancestors yelling / from the mental ward of hell,' declares Cynthia Atkins near the start of 'In the Event of Full Disclosure,' a book that explores what it means when mental illness becomes close as blood. Family offers both comfort and disquiet. In these elegant, beautifully observed poems, Atkins considers the burden of being a daughter, a sibling, a mother of wars domestic and national, and of the fact that all of us are 'born in a trick of love.'"—Jehanne Dubrow
"Rhapsodic, generous, and seriously witty, this poetry invites us to discover new routes through our dizzying contemporary situation. So much of wide-ranging experience is drawn into this startling poetry—and with such energy. Cynthia Atkins’s speakers refuse to let their word-loving heads be pushed underwater by despair. They rise up, their propulsive language bringing to the surface the troubling signs of our time, all the while defying the risks we face, coining phrases (a character acts 'like a freak teapot'), and delivering us at last to intimations about "the room beyond / the room of knowledge."—Lee Upton
"I like the easy and big-hearted familiarity with the reader that Cynthia Atkins shows in her poetry. She doesn't keep us at arm's length. She invites us right in, an act that lends confidence and helps to break down the barriers between writer and reader. At those moments when the 'small feet / of silence conspire / in your ear' and 'the gibbous moon rises / like an old rubbed coin,' we feel we are right there with her. What a pleasure it is to be in the presence of poetry that is so readable and companionable!"
—Richard Tillinghast
"Cynthia Atkins' extraordinary collection is a display of precious, vacuum-packed, uranium-heavy poems that still glow in the dark a long time after you have finished reading them, illuminating your heart and guts from the inside."—Seb Doubinsky
ON THE BOOKSHELF
IN OTHER WORDS MERIDA: http://www.inotherwordsmerida.com/2013/09/14/around-and-about-test/
VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW: http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/v15n1/recentbooks15.php with thanks to Edward Byrne
BELTWAY POETRY QUARTERLY: http://www.beltwaypoetry.com/resources/new-books/ with thanks to Kim Roberts
PSYCHE'S WEATHERS
Publisher: http://www.readcwbooks.com/atkins.html
To order: http://www.amazon.com/Psyches-Weathers-Cynthia-Atkins/dp/1933456876/ref=pdbbssr1?ie=UTF8&s=booksref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200339939&sr=8-1
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/psyches-weathers-cynthia-atkins/1008808698"
Psyche’s Weathers is a savvy testament to the presence of personal significance and communal sacredness in the most mundane aspects of our world."
--Christina Cook, Poet's Quarterly, Winter 2011