Hotel Oblivion

by Cynthia Cruz

Overview

A specter, haunting the edges of society: because neoliberalism insists there are no social classes, thus, there is no working class, the main subject of Hotel Oblivion, a working class subject, does not exist. With no access to a past, she has no home, no history, no memory. And yet, despite all this, she will not assimilate. Instead, this book chronicles the subject’s repeated attempts at locating an exit from capitalist society via acts of negative freedom and through engagement with the death drive, whose aim is complete destruction in order to begin all over again. In the end, of course, the only true exit and only possibility for emancipation for the working class subject is through a return to one’s self. In Hotel Oblivion, through a series of fragments and interrelated poems, Cruz resists invisibilizing forces, undergoing numerous attempts at transfiguration in a concerted effort to escape her fate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954245198
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	02/15/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	600,189
File size:	634 KB

About the Author

Cruz is the author of six collections of poems: Guidebooks for the Dead (Four Way Books, 2020), Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018), How the End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016), Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014), The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012) and Ruin (Alice James Books, 2006). Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays exploring the concept of silence as a form of resistance, was published by Book*hug in the spring of 2019. The Melancholia of Class, an exploration of melancholia and the working class, was published by Repeater Books in July of 2021.

Cruz earned an MA in German Language and Literature from Rutgers University and is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School where her area of research is psychoanalysis and philosophy. Cruz teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University and is a visiting writer in the MFA Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is also a mentor in the Low Residency MFA Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Cruz co-edits the multi- disciplinary online journal, Schlag Magazine.

Read an Excerpt

"Saturday"

What is a fragment, a found
postcard, ephemera, ruin or a photograph.
For example: Doris Peter’s “Children
collecting scrap metal, George Washington Street,
1997,” Russian. Or a Che Guevara montage
on dream board in the sweetshop, Neukölln.
Why glean, why assemble, or
how does accumulation keep.
How does getting it all down
do the same work as making. And how
is the gluing of words together
not unlike taking something beautiful apart.
In the afternoon, on Saturday,
I bought a pale blue dress from Humana
and walked alone, home, in it,
through the parades of my emptiness.

Table of Contents

Neukölln 3

Blood Work-Steady Decline 4

Stammer 5

Number 7

Saturday 9

The Ring 10

Fragment: Pollen 11

Fragment: Small Talk on Melancholia 13

Fragment: On the Magical World of the Animal 15

Hotel Letter 16

Hotel Letter 17

Hotel Letter 19

Hotel Letter 20

Hotel Letter 21

Hotel Letter (Refrain) 22

Hotel Letter 24

Hotel Letter 26

Hotel Letter 27

Fragment: Verzweiflung 28

Fragment: Verwüstung 29

Fragment 30

Fragment: The Earth Like a Golden Goblet Over Whose Rim the Golden Ripples of the Moon Foamed 31

Refrain 32

Ursprung 33

Fragment 34

Hotel Warsaw 36

Fragment 39

Hotel Letter 40

Hotel Letter 42

Fragment 44

Fragment 46

Hotel Letter 47

Hotel Letter 49

Refrain 51

Refrain 53

Fragment 55

Phosphorescence 56

Fragment 58

The Moment of Exposure Is the Moment When It All Begins 59

Fragment 60

Fragment 62

The Gift 64

Fragment: I Twice Drew, Both Times from a Different Angle, the Gap Between Two Poplar Trees 66

Fragment: Warsaw 68

Hotel Belgrade 69

Fragment 70

Correspondence 71

Fragment 73

The Undersong 74

Fragment 75

Hotel Warsaw: Fragment 77

Philosophy 78

The Way 80

Small Atlas 81

Tagebücher 83

Hotel Letter 85

Felt 86

Fragment: Nachleben 88

Correspondence 90

Schöna 92

The Reason 94

The Language 96

Fragment: With Scrap of Fur on My Left Shoulder 98

Hotel Nocturnal 99

Bambule 100

The Moment 101

Definition 103

Its Origins 104

Notes

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/21/2022

In these brilliant and ethereal poems, Cruz (Guidebook for the Dead) inhabits an almost-invisible subject: someone who, because of the trappings of class and society is “touched and tendered, but never nourished, never fed.” Cruz asks: “how can you love me/ if you don’t know me.” With haunting imagery that feels like “the top layer of a dream,” these poems navigate worlds of artistry and desire, questioning the purpose of living a life of the mind, particularly when the body “is its own/ strange, and mystical language” and language is “always broken, and imperfect.” Cruz interrogates the ways class intersects with art, and what happens when an artist is “afraid most of the time of own intensity.” She also addresses the way in which poetry might offer a “new language,” but only if society is willing to hear it. “Shame,” Cruz seems to say, is what an artist will “carry... everywhere.” This collection offers a deeply necessary exploration of the role of the artist in society, and society’s responsibility toward the artist. While these curious and inquisitive poems reach for the universal, Cruz’s poetry is wholly her own. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Cynthia Cruz’s Hotel Oblivion is a harrowing noir, hypnotic in the same way the dull thud of the pulse, from inside pain, can hypnotize. This is a self-portrait of the self that exists—in flashes—in the interstices between what we call the body, what we call the mind, and what we call art (or the study of art, the regard we maintain for art as a human project). Unica Zürn and Jean Genet are the presiding elders of this doubled journey across damaged selfhood and Mitteleuropa. ‘The mind,’ Cruz avers, ‘is just a dumb machine / that makes small traces,’ poem by poem. ‘And I have begun now to imagine,’ Cruz ventures, ‘what it might be like / to make art entirely / in solitude, to finally / enter the work, and become / what I have been for so many years / afraid of: the space between, the place / of magnificent, though mostly / terrifying, silence.’”
—G. C. Waldrep

“Hélène Cixous said, ‘The writers I love are descenders, explorers of the lowest and deepest,’ and Cynthia Cruz is a master of descent. Her exquisite new collection, Hotel Oblivion, emerges from ‘the terrible intimacy / of the mouth’ in the form of letters and fragments composed in isolation across hotel rooms in Warsaw, Berlin, and Belgrade. These rooms double as art studios and prisons, as well as rooms of the mind, in which Cruz’s speaker remembers, unknows, and reaches toward a ‘self- / made language’ which is ‘not unlike taking something beautiful apart.’ Hotel Oblivion is a compulsive read—it rivets with its obsessiveness, world-building, and refusal to sublimate: ‘Now the poems are coming like gray rings / of memory. Or an endless series of Polaroids.’ Dear reader, when I got to the end, I wanted to begin again.”
—Allison Benis White

From the Publisher