Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room
Cynthia Bargar’s Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room explores the interior of the self over the course of a lifetime, tracing the long travail of the self when faced with an imposed multiplicity, a fracturing of identity. The tragic failures of culture, institutions, and medicine itself are laid bare in these pages. Bargar has created a work that challenges the boundaries of genre while indicting a world that refuses to examine its own culpability in silencing the brave and the vulnerable—as the speaker is warned at one point by an attendant in a mental health facility, “Laugh too loud,/ they take the laugh away.” This is a courageous book—made to be read in one sitting, made to linger in the imagination.
—Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country, and Here, Bullet
About Cynthia
Cynthia Bargar is Associate Poetry editor at Pangyrus. Her poems have appeared in many journals, most recently Rogue Agent, Book of Matches, Driftwood Press, and in the book, Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits by Barbara E. Cohen (Provincetown Arts Press, 2021). Her first poetry collection, Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room, came out from Lily Poetry Review Books in January, 2022. Cynthia lives with her partner, cartoonist Nick Thorkelson, in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
To Purchase
Lily Poetry Review Press
Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room
$21.00 (including shipping), 82 pages, paper
ISBN: 978-1-7375043-3-7
Publication Date: January 2022