Unclenching by Cindy Glovinsky

What’s it like to work with a bully? What’s it like to hold an office “day job” when you’d rather be doing something else?  What’s it like to retire? What’s it like to worry about medical tests, mortality, and countless other hazards? What’s it like to play solitaire or work out at the Y? What’s it like to watch sparrows feeding or contemplate lake water? What’s it like to come to an acceptance of the uncontrollable, to “unclench”? These are just some of the experiences Cindy Glovinsky explores in her poetry collection, Unclenching. The poems in this book are guaranteed to provide companionship to the reader who feels alone amidst the challenges of everyday life. Written with honesty, wisdom, and gentle humor, they are poems to read, reread, and love.

Cindy Glovinsky has an unmistakable presence and voice. The poems in Unclenching chronicle the responses of a fervent consciousness taking on whatever the quotidian has to throw at it in the form of boredom or frustration or craziness or injustice and giving back at least as good as it gets. At times the voice is resigned – “I wonder why we tried so hard/to change things/if this is where we were going to end up” (“They Don’t Know”) –while at other times it channels the energy and outrage of stand-up comedy. But, in whatever mode, it remains the expression of a serious, thinking, feeling, and eminently relatable fellow human being as she entices us into accompanying her on this entertaining, engaging, and occasionally wild ride.

–Bruce Bennett, Emeritus Professor of English, Wells College, author of Just Another Day in Just Our Town, Poems: New and Selected, 2000-2016 (Orchises Press, 2017).

Her careful scrutiny of the day that’s in it brings to these poems an urgency and immediacy that repays the reader’s attentions.  Good to have Cindy Glovinsky on the record.

–Thomas Lynch – author of BONE ROSARY – New & Selected Poems