Everyone Here

by Cecily Iddings

"Though not especially guarded, her poems are nonetheless prepared–spinning and flipping between unhappy, playful, and politically reflective moods, vaulting from domestic to demented to demonic, they always hit the ground precisely and decisively. By being direct, definite, open and unobtrusive, their performance of the first person singular become a conduit to shared experience."

– Frank Guan (from the publisher's website)

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2014

About the author

Cecily Iddings' poems have appeared in magazines such as Article, Boog City, Horse Less Review, jubilat, Meridian, Octopus, Saltgrass, Sixth Finch, Skein, Spinning Jenny, Spork Press, and Verse Daily. Iddings assisted at Verse, was Slope Editions’ managing editor for several years, and cofounded the poetry newsletter The Blue Letter. A graduate of the writing workshops at the University of Georgia and University of Massachusetts Amherst, she now lives in Brooklyn and teaches high school students with school phobia.

Reviews

[Simeon Berry]

No joke, folks, Cecily Iddings' first book denotes great things to come (and great things already arrived). Oblique, nimble, and adroit, this debut is a Master Class in voice, bodying forth an effortless, mutated chorale of Self and Other, direct and indirect. Iddings makes physicality wonderfully prismatic, critiquing the cognitive conjunctions we all deploy in trying to negotiate the psychic penumbra of this carbon-based challenge. I can't think of any other book I've read in years that achieves authenticity so gracefully without being confessionally abject, nor one so beautifully elliptical and elaborate without so much as a tinge of disappointing evasiveness.

[birdmaddgirl]

taut and troubling.