Common Disaster available now!
“The poems of Common Disaster arise with such precision and clarity—extraordinary in their lyric terrains, their veracities of insightful and hard-earned detail, and their many brilliant accomplishments at the level of the line as well as in expansive response to the exigencies of the catastrophic time—that readers will come away from the page replenished, informed, surprised, and even saved by them. Thematically ambitious but never grandiose, formally considered but never formally constrained, M. Cynthia Cheung has been hard at work in the forum of life and death. Her poetics are those of the highest order, arriving with grace and intelligence, substance and vigor, beyond language while also before it. I cannot turn away from these poems, and, with conviction, believe that the poems of Common Disaster will take hold and continue ‘[...] to carry / all we cannot speak.’ ”
—Joan Naviyuk Kane
“M. Cynthia Cheung has a mind that is wild and vivid and impossible to predict. Here, Cheung meditates on the complexities of dying in hospital, on the indignities and hopes of the helpless, on the dailyness of mortal threat. Here, also, she considers a horrifying sand burial near Sutton Hoo, or the mind of Charles Darwin, or the experience of a world-obliterating meteor sixty-six million years ago. Here is a two-headed dog and the origins of transplant surgery and here are the living wolves at Chernobyl. Common Disaster is a book of great technical skill, craftsmanship, and variety, a book obsessed not only with witnessing history and daily life, but finding in them the profoundly human truths—the facts of mortality, of environment, of family, and of love. This is a terrific first book, one I will return to with great pleasure.”
—Kevin Prufer
“Ghazals with refrains that range from 'nowhere' to the 'Orient' to 'God,' scatterplots of intense phrases, prose poems, and free verse combine in this collection that showcases admirable ambition and dexterity. Physician-poet M. Cynthia Cheung incorporates a strong personal and political conscience in her science-quickened art. She has made poems that are 'Continents scarred with cuneiform,' giving voice to present-day headlines and niche history with equal insight and compassion. Common Disaster is a rare blessing of a book."
—Amit Majmudar