Bittersweet Swallows by Cindy L. Cunningham

By turns weighted with grief and gravity-defying, the lyrics gathered here, steeped in the sweet-tea vernacular of a Carolina raconteur, infuse a fiercely re-imagined mythography with the perennial fracturings of family narrative. These poems are not afraid to look us in the eye while they start a good argument. After all, in a world where Mrs. Claus is one memorial service away from donning her deerskin boots, tossing a supply of venison jerky into a duffle, and heading South, who can afford to mistake simple exhaustion for cynicism? This poet realizes elegance is complicated, sex is not triage, and the heart gives us pain in the strangest of places.

–Randy Marshall; Associate Poetry Editor, Blackbird

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Cindy Cunningham’s wise and poignant collection Bittersweet Swallows dwells in the realms of our histories, in the ancient stories of myth and belief, and then deftly blends these with the personal mythologies we are often compelled to write and then live within. It’s a book that is, at its heart, about love, about the push to affiliate even when all of our histories tell us this may be the source of pain. But Cunningham’s ultimate triumph is in her capture of the labors of birth and rebirth, her startling realization that it is through these that we are able to finally step from darkness into a moving and richly authentic world.

–Amy Tudor, author of A Book of Birds and The Professor of Bees

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Cindy Cunningham’s poems explore the fact that we’re all “more alike than we understand,” and they are strong with an ample cast of characters, solid settings, telling details. Cunningham knows that “more people die each year from what they love / than from what they fear.” Enduring and celebrating both the flesh and the spirit, Bittersweet Swallows–like its author’s stained-glass angel–has “one wing in the ether and one in the methane bloom.”

–Ron Smith, author of Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery,
Moon Road, and Its Ghostly Workshop.

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]