Reviews of American Girl
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A Brenda Hillman Selection

“Cynie Cory roams the outer reaches of the heart’s territory, from the snowy winter of family life to the tropical jungles of love. She wears her heart on her sleeve and it is as big as the country she writes about. Is she the quintessential American girl? You bet she is, part Annie Oakley, part Emily Dickinson—sharpshooting poet of wild nights. She zooms in on the detritus of love—the broken fragments, the fallen leaves—and puts together a collage that is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. Watch out—she’s driving down your street.”

—Barbara Hamby

“Cynie Cory’s poems dare to approach the sublime—the sublime in madness, in desire, in grief. Laments, love letters,
eulogies—all of these surface in the seascape of American Girl.”

—Kathryn Harrison

"The voices is these poems revise the standart image of the all-American girl and make her one that is truer, more real, but also more complex and ambiguous. American Girl reveals the difficult universe of an emotional dreamscape that churns within us in a country that hides both darkness and light in its hears."

—Michael Trammell, The Southeast Review

"Much of the literary iconography of Northern Michigan has been drawn in the masculine tradition of Hemingway and Jim Harrison. Hard drinking and blood sports predominate; the legends and characters that inhabit literature from this terrain are wild, raw, and overwhelmingly male. This collection of achingly beautiful, subversive poems . . . dares the reader to venture beyond that traditional paradigm." (Read the entire Review)

—Melanie Drane, Foreword Magazine

"Cory’s poetry proceeds without pretension, a poetry that refuses to supply false beauty, but one that is also unable to leave us with a message of utter despair. Cory is an American girl worth consulting." (Read the entire review)

—Jenny Boully, Maisonneuve/Movable Type

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