Telling You Everything
There is something inescapable about Cindy Hochman's Telling You Everything. Once you start reading the book, you can't put it down. You've entered a wild river of words that dunks you and bruises you until you're washed ashore somewhere. Sooner or later, most people will be battered, rejected, and disgusted. These poems hold up a mirror to that truth-and release us from it.
-Michael Ruby, News editor at The Wall Street Journal and author of American Songbook
Tough, resilient, and beguiling, Telling You Everything cements Cindy Hochman's position as unofficial poet laureate of Brooklyn. In ludic and percussive poems, she offers a rousing poetics of resistance, brimming with sharp wit and big belly laughs. Indeed, the subversive power of Hochman's poetry is deeply rooted in revolution and social critique-and also in fierce and tender explorations of the danger and sublimity of living. With one hand Hochman is ushering us into electrifying and slanted visions and with the other she is holding us carefully at bay. In this collection, Hochman's parodic play is hauntingly potent and transgressively thrilling.
-Cassandra Atherton, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University, Australia, and author of Prose Poetry: An Introduction
Telling You Everything is more than the title phrase of Cindy Hochman's clever and intriguing new chapbook. It's also a notification. Forget sugar and spice and everything nice. In the very first poem Cindy informs us that she's "all moan and bone and dangling participles." Who are we to doubt her? After all, we're dealing with, as she announces in another poem, "the girl with the bon voyage eyes." Elsewhere, she's a tireless foreign correspondent, filing dispatches from a strange, dissonant world inhabited by frogs in pajamas, phantom babies, and senators who "waddle single file like a row of German ducklings." As if all of this isn't enough, she revels in and reacquaints us with the euphony, the versatility, and, yes, even the silliness of some words.
After reading the twenty-six poems in Telling You Everything, we find ourselves hoping Cindy one day will have more to tell us.
-Joel Allegretti, author of Platypus
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