Or Consequence

Cynthia Hogue’s stunning new collection, Or Consequence, by turns bristles with spiked, jagged lines or rustles with deep emotion, in poems that range ambitiously from meditations on “freedom” in the central long poetic cycle based on an archival slave narrative to poems crossing cultural and formal boundaries.  Hogue’s is an innovative poetics of inquiry and outrage, an analytic lyric striking a balance between methods of narrative and assemblage, and finally, between love and hope in the twenty-first century.