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Cindy Huyser
In Cindy Huyser’s debut poetry collection, Cartography, the poet brilliantly describes a landscape of both ecstasy and grief; hers is a map-making grounded in the body that tracks the metamorphosis of its speaker over time and under pressure. Founded within the particularities of science and in conversation with myth, hymn, and art, this collection takes the reader on a poignant journey-within-a-journey through poems formal and free verse, marrying music to metaphor as its voices join in a song of what it is to survive. As Huyser writes, “My map/an unreachable satellite./I turn toward the stars/and their burning,”
From its first poem, Cindy Huyser’s debut collection Cartography brings me to my knees, to bow before the surf of sea in prayer. As a cartographer, the speakers in these poems direct their readers across the vast expanses of the United States and the speaker’s “queer life silent/as limestone,” all elegiac and thunderous with heart. There are no easy answers here, just the unsettling of the self of emergent survival against despair, demon possession, and the witness of time. These poems thrum with will—beseech readers “do not pity me./There is solace in this dislocation:/I have learned even stone/can bend to survive.” This roadmap will come in handy for anyone who has ever loved another—for all of us who struggle to find our way out of the country of grief.
—Rajiv Mohabir, Whale Aria
In the spirit of Jorie Graham and Jean Valentine, the imaginative yet restrained power of these poems is not unlike the sea: they give, they take back, they reveal, they claim again beneath their waves of bereavement, bewilderment, triumph, and wisdom. Rather than closure, reckoning is the shore Cartography points us to. How do we love, how do we manage, how do we be all at once the self we have divided to care for our dearest and our dead? How do we carry that weight across such a distance into language, allowing us the chance to live again this life, anew? With the intensity of interiority made iridescent as a pearl inside a shell, Huyser shows us how. She shows us that there’s a drowned world waiting to meet us. Let’s go. Let’s go, together.
—Paul Tran, All the Flowers Kneeling
As if today Sappho were narrating the Odyssean journey, charting a lyrical course of desire that is the grief-longing for the beloved that is home, that is gone, that is/was always and so near—I thought as I read Cartography. This is not the hero’s quest for immortality, but a human’s map-making of a mortal life and the love that is its way and its world. Before our eyes, Cindy Huyser charts a journey of journeys that winds into the geography of the heart, through our material world of asphalt roads and ship-ridden oceans, mountains and volcanos, the deserts of the American southwest and of myth, into and of the vehicle that is the body and its encounters. The language is precise, imagistic, quiet and unflinchingly intelligent. We have so needed this lesson in cartography. How did we travel before?
—Katherine Durham Oldmixon Garza, Life Afterlife / A Book of the Hours
Cindy Huyser grew up in metro Detroit and holds a B. A. in English with a minor in mathematics from Tri-State (now Trine) University in Angola, Indiana. After moving to Austin, Texas, she took a temporary job that led to a power plant operations career in which she marked two “female firsts” for the City of Austin Electric Utility, now known as Austin Energy. She later received an M. S. in Computer Science from Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas and an MFA in Writing (poetry) from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.
Huyser’s chapbook, Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems, was co-winner of the 2014 Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her work has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and appears in a variety of journals and anthologies. Huyser co-edited Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016) with Scott Wiggerman and has collaborated with Dos Gatos Press and Kallisto-Gaia Press as an editor for the Texas Poetry Calendar (2009-2014 and 2019 editions).
