We Have Gone to the Beach

by Cynthia Huntington

We Have Gone to the Beach is a collection of lyric and narrative poems, many of them set in Southern California, in which the disquieting aspects of contemporary suburban culture are explored, often in a darkly humerous light. At the heart of the book is a cycle of poems about specific individuals whose lives enact the states of social and spiritual crisis shared by the author.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1996

About the author

Cynthia Huntington is an American poet, memoirist and a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. She has published several books of poetry, most recently The Radiant (Four Way Books, 2003). In 2004 she was named Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including TriQuarterly, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Cimarron Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, and Massachusetts Review, and in anthologies including The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Sribner, 2008) and Contemporary Poetry of New England (Middlebury College Press, 2002).

Huntington has received grants from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Other awards include: the Robert Frost Prize from The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, the Jane Kenyon Award in Poetry, and the Emily Clark Balch Prize.

She was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and received her M.A. from The Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College.