Cruel Futures: City Lights Spotlight No. 17: City Lights Spotlight

Cruel Futures is a witchy confessional and wildly imagistic volume that examines subjects as divergent as Alzheimers, Medusa, mumblecore, and mental illness in sharp-witted, taut poems dense with song. Chronicling life on an endangered planet, in a country on the precipice of profound change compelled by a media machine that produces our realities, the book is a high-energy analysis of popular culture, as well as an exploration of the many social roles that women occupy as mother, daughter, lover, and the resulting struggle to maintain personhood--all in a late capitalist America.

Praise for Cruel Futures:

Gim nez Smith seeks release from the pressures of societal expectations in this collection of brief yet powerful poems. ... Gim nez Smith's crisp lyrics and imagery highlight ever-present threats to female personhood and autonomy.--Publishers Weekly

Cruel Futures is one of those rare books, rare pieces of art, that manages to be extremely intimate, vulnerable and close while also doing a kind of searing cultural critique. The poems can be tender or ironic, and sometimes a blending of the two, which is not easy.--Ross Gay

In the body, through the lyric, and twitching with every sense of the word 'nerve, ' this book sings a mongrel nation into and across its cruel futures. Like Neruda in his Plenos Poderes/Full Powers, Gim nez Smith has all the mastery she needs to cast a cold eye on her positioning, and ours. In this way Cruel Futures is an autobiography that won't stay in its genre or premise, caring less to author a self than to follow turns of magic in words that might soothe our 'collisions with the living.'--Farid Matuk

Declamatory anthems to no nation, these songs stride as they deal and wheel with skin and kin: history, catastrophe, the body, love. 'Upturned and defiant, all types of shade, no outskirt, / vital like a saint, ' the poems in Cruel Futures shimmer with Gim nez Smith's lyric attention: full of grit, sharp and knowing.--Hoa Nguyen