Continuity

“Cynthia Arrieu-King’s beautiful new book manages to feel written on the occasion of both a birth and a death, and perhaps it means to remind us that the passage of time necessitates both, as it brims with energy and elegy at once. I love the urge and pull of her richly textured language, her vision of what sorrow can teach us, her poem-as-jeweled-time-travelling- mausoleum, a place where we keep both our beloveds and our own past selves. Elegy doesn’t resurrect, but in Continuity it does teach, distill, unveil. It folds time. Thus it reaches for, thus it does reach. “They keep / saying your place / isn’t a room, but / a kind of paragraph.” Yes. Here. My gratitude to this poet for showing me new languages for feelings I thought I knew.”

—Wendy Xu

Futureless Languages

Cynthia Arrieu-King's Futureless Languages is a book about evil kings and leaders, curses, harbingers, languages, mystic translation, elegy, and the Anthropocene. As Ana Božičević points out, it is "a mixed tape of things 'beyond interpretation'. . . 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."