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

Manifest

Literature & Fiction

Arrieu-King, Cynthia

Poetry

Switchback Books

Poetry. "I can't remember when a book of poems has invited such an attentive reading as Cindy King's marvelous first volume, PEOPLE ARE TINY IN PAINTINGS OF CHINA. Each poem, a descent through shifting strata of syntax and history, requires a sustained renegotiation of one's balance in language and the world. As I read I had the feeling of launching myself from an opening line and falling past gorgeous and complex surfaces, an intricate landscape of experience, until landing on the solid earth of the final lines of these extraordinary poems. PEOPLE ARE TINY IN PAINTINGS OF CHINA is a work of uncommon talent"—Lynn Emanuel.

People Are Tiny in Paintings of China

Octopus Books

Poetry. A collaborative text by two beloved poets, Cynthia Arrieu–King and the late Hillary Gravendyk, UNLIKELY CONDITIONS, "was written as a way to embellish and perpetuate a friendship." Of her process working with Gravendyk, Arrieu–King says: "We created this book through conversation about what remains important as we get older, jokes, inferences about existence, shared experience, separate experiences melded together, and a hilarious engagement with detail. We had a lot of fun together. This was the experience with all of Hillary's collaborators including her sister Megan Estrella, Maureen Alsop, Colleen Rosenfeld, Brenda Hillman, etc. I'm putting it out in the world because my friend and I had always talked about that as a given and also because I feel Hillary's family and other readers would want to see the beautiful work she did with me, and see a bit more of her intelligent heart and her love for life."

Unlikely Conditions

Gravendyk, Hillary

1913 Press

Poetry. "You have no future because you are in it. And so, what is now? What does it feel like, what is its real language? Is someone or something dying, going on, or gone? Cynthia Arrieu-King is a gifted, present poet, but I forget her, reading this (and it is hers) account of a world going more and more 'off'--off-base, out of kilter, not like some previously perceptible 'normal': it is real, and it is a dream. The souring world is a dream. But this is such an interesting book! The author is an honest tracker, so you never know, finally, what she'll say, in her own futureless language."--Alice Notley "FUTURELESS LANGUAGES is a manual for you written in the sound of the wind, in the language 'the air in the rock speaks.' A mixed tape of things 'beyond interpretation.' Manifesto made all of questions and a very listening speech: 'how did I get here? what should we do?' King writes a poetry of now that bears out how language already accesses tomorrows: a simple switch of tense changes everything, like the time traveler who butterfly-effects their own birth. While they hold language's paradoxes, these poems hold the world's too. 'Every time I watch the news I delete a few more poems.'--but the ones that remain brim with the fragile power of the poet's word. That power whose truth still get poets detained. King's poems work as embodiments and records, laments and wishes: 'To walk outside at / midnight with zero fear.' Locations, languages flow, revealing observation for translation, syntax for alchemy, and poetry to be 'a toil and an art,' time-spinning and thing-keeping. FUTURELESS LANGUAGES is tender, brilliant play: read it aloud."--Ana Boži?evi?

FUTURELESS LANGUAGES

Radiator Press

Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. In THE BETWEENS, Arrieu-King builds an experimental memoir from prose blocks: ones about microaggressions, scientific facts, as well as metaphors from art, history, and textile arts. In this book of lyric prose, those caught between two cultures can see their negotiation of the two accrete into something beyond a binary narrative. It also asks how one's point of view opens the world or limits us, and what to do with the suffering that we ultimately experience and cause.

The Betweens

History & Criticism

Noemi Press