Cynthia Manick (Poetry) | Brooklyn, NY
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Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). A Pushcart Prize nominated poet with a MFA in Creative Writing from the New School; she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, the MacDowell Colony, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation of the Arts among others. Winner of the 2016 Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry and the 2018 Elizabeth Sloan Tyler Memorial Award; Manick is Founder and Curator of the reading series Soul Sister Revue. Her poem “Things I Carry Into the World” was made into a film by Motionpoems, a organization dedicated to video poetry, and has debuted on Tidal for National Poetry Month and Reel 13 Shorts. Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, Kweli Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), Muzzle Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Books
Blurbs, Press, & Reviews
“Cynthia Manick’s Blue Hallelujahs bring us to a broil like Koko Taylor’s ‘white-toothed love coils on repeat.’ Here, we have a gospel of womanly sharpness, a kitchen sinked and hot combed diary of the way Blues grinds into the 21st century. Gifted with the ability to smolder into surprise and swelter, Manick’s reflections on discovery and loss will bring you to a ‘slow applause under the skin.’ Thank you for this bouquet of sheet music filled with church organ and pistol smoke, Ms. Manick. We gone need it to get to the other side.”
—Tyehimba Jess (Pulitzer-Prize Winner of Olio)
“What we remember is what we become. Rocking chairs holding mothers and ‘animals that root the ground for peaches, bones and stars.’ In Blue Hallelujahs Cynthia Manick holds fast to what brought us across. These are not the things you will hear about Black people on the nightly news. But they remain the things that lock the arms of Black people around Black people when we need what we need to keep moving on. I am so grateful to this sweet box of sacred words.”
—Nikky Finney (National Book Award Winner of Head Off & Split)
“The speaker of Cynthia Manick’s haunted debut collection admits ‘a love for surgery porn at 1 a.m.’ And one early poem begins, ‘Today I am elbow deep / in some animal’s belly // pulling out the heart and stomach / for my mother’s table.’ Throughout, Blue Hallelujahs approaches aspects of a woman’s development—from ‘feet first’ Caesarean delivery to a grandmother’s admonition ‘to pull flesh / from the throat not the belly’—blade at the ready, moving from slaughter to surgery to a kind of deep southern haruspication. At the center of girlhood we find The Shop with its inventory of inherited hungers. ‘Is this what the heart eats?’ Manick renders visceral a longing to avoid extinction, to escape the museum, to live fully embodying one’s identity as a woman who ‘knows / how to wield a knife.’
—Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (author of Open Internal)