elsewhere held and lingered

“What happens to the self when it permits the transgressive act? Past the boundaries of its predicament, the self in elsewhere held and lingered survives fractured, casting a vigorously unforgiving eye back on itself and fatally attentive to the mullioned and unsteady narratives to which it has opened itself up. Cruz’s second collection of poems is rigorously imagined and wrought with such tenacity that makes reading it a pleasure but none the less harrowing.”—Mabi David