Reviews of Flux
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“Emerson described life as ‘a flux of moods’ and in her fine new book of poems, her best yet, Cynthia Hogue takes that impermanence, that emotional volatility, as her first subject, reading the natural world for signs, pushing the far edges of things, invoking her key female precursors as inspirational presences (Emily Dickinson, H.D.), and letting her imagination flow and even soar against the brute realities of death.”

—Edward Hirsch

“Cynthia Hogue’s poetry has always been a model of elegant compression and chiseled clarity. In her powerful new collection, Flux, she charts the necessity of human passion and individual courage in the face of those sometimes unexpected changes of experience and alterations to fate. With a remarkable poise, intelligence and maturity, Cynthia Hogue summons both fable and cultural dream-life to help address the otherwise precarious nature of a life’s passage. Precise yet expansive, this is an exhilarating collection of poems.”

—David St. John

“What marvelous rituals of preparation, dream, life, discovery, mystery, myth, these elegiac poems of survival. Fully aware of so many deaths, so many passages, Hogue takes us through portals, doors, painted rocks and skies to the seam between what we admit and what we won't. The poems in Flux pit themselves against oblivion. I think of the poet as midwife to the departed, living or dead, including her self.”

—Peggy Shumaker

"...Hogue's touchstones are Emily Dickinson, HD, and Marianne Moore, and she pushes her innovative moves farther. Her hallmark as a poet is longing, for human connection, for what we might call wholeness. The dominant theme in Flux, expressed in every element (animal, mineral, vegetable) is the difficulty of communication. Every ground is unstable, every meaning is slippery, and every kind of knowledge refracts into mystery--yet we seek, search, quest, the human essence being to try. The underlying sadness of this is palpable. Hogue's touch is gentle, thoughtful, probing, like a good physician's. ...Hogue's poems in Flux, her third book, are challenging intellectually, and on the visceral level, complex. She is one of the most interesting poets I know, not settling for one or the other, always pushing the language, kneading and shaping it like dough. This is a poet honest enough to enter the space 'between what you admit / and what you won't.' "

—Pamela Petro, The Women's Review of Books