Disquieting: Essays on Silence by Cynthia Cruz

How do our bodies speak for us when words don’t suffice? How can we make ourselves understood when what we have to say is inarticulable?

In Disquieting, Cynthia Cruz tarries with others who have provided examples of how to “turn away,” or reject the ideologies of contemporary neoliberal culture. These essays inhabit connections between silence, refusal, anorexia, mental illness, and neoliberalism. Cruz also explores the experience of being working-class and poor in contemporary culture, and how those who are silenced often turn to forms of disquietude that value open-endedness, complexity, and difficulty.

Disquieting: Essays on Silence draws on philosophy, theory, art, film, and literature to offer alternative ways of being in this world and possibilities for building a new one.

Press Coverage for Disquieting:

What We’re Reading: Editors’ Picks, Spring 2019 —Hamilton Review of Books

“Cruz’s collection of essays is unafraid to dwell in this disquieting betwixt, this space that asks for radical listening, for redefinitions of worth and value, and for resistance to assimilation. Throughout the book, we learn that resistance is both necessary and painful, destructive and healing.” —Emmalea Russo, Los Angeles Review of Books

The Unsayable: a Conversation with Cynthia Cruz —Paul Rowe, 3:Am Magazine

Cynthia Cruz was born in Germany and grew up in Northern California. She is the author of four previous collections of poems. Her fifth collection is Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018). The editor of a new anthology of contemporary Latina poetry, Other Musics (forthcoming in 2019), Cruz is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder fellowship from Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.