What the Critics Say
About James Cihlar
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What do we know about James Cihlar and his first book, Undoing? That “words are tied up with places,” that colors can stand alone, for themselves, or for an empty sleeve, or the sky in Nebraska, “a white wall . . . pulsing like a ghost” or “a blue so near//you can sink your hand in/a tarp you can reach up and touch.” We know “I didn’t know I could be who I am//until I left my hometown.” We know that “sometimes a little upheaval is good for a life” and that partners in houses know that “one of us is in transit, in motion,/ at risk, and the other/ needs to keep our place safe for return.” We know what rises in this lovely book, as surely as cream, is the sweet life in the speaker, a poet, a lover of words, colors, domiciles, cats, his husband, his need to sing and sing and sing from the junk heap of a wrecked childhood the daily pleasures of lives lived at risk. Read “Gertrude Christina in Repose” and be glad we’ve come upon Jim Cihlar’s poems. Here is forgiveness and joy. And the wisdom that comes, who knows how, through the measured language of memory that will not be undone.
— Hilda Raz, author of Trans and All Odd and Splendid
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