BookWoman poetry presents Cindy Huyser's Cartography

BookWoman is delighted to welcome Cindy Huyser in this reading to celebrate her debut full-length poetry collection, Cartography (3: A Taos Press, March 2025) on Sunday, April 6, from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. CDT at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105). The reading will be simultaneouslyy YouTube livestreamed at https://www.youtube.com/@cindyhuyser (registration not required).

Cindy Huyser, the long-time host of BookWoman's 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading and Open Mic, is also the author ofBurning Number Five: Power Plant Poems (Blue Horse Press, 2014), co-winner of the Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook contest, and co-editor of Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016). She also edited / co-edited several editions of The Texas Poetry Calendar. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University.

Cartography describes a landscape of ecstasy and grief; it is a map-making grounded in the body that tracks the metamorphosis of its speaker over time and under pressure. Grounded in the particularities of science and in conversation with myth, hymn, and art, this collection takes the reader on a 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.

Praise for Cartography:

“As bodies exert their forces / that afternoon, begins this sublime collection by Cindy Huyser, the sea drew back her garments. In the spirit of Jorie Graham and Jean Valentine, the imaginative yet restrained power of these poems are 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, author of All the Flowers Kneeling

If you're joining us in-store at 5001 N. Lamar #A-105, be sure to bring a mask, as BookWoman continues to require them in the spirit of protecting the vulnerable among us.

Contact BookWoman to order your copy of Cartography, Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems, and other titles for in-store pickup, curbside delivery and direct-from-warehouse shipping: [email protected]; (512)472-2785; https://ebookwoman.com .

Cindy Huyser. Photo credit: Patrick Larson

Host or Publisher Cindy Huyser