Hot off the press! This insightful review by Michael Klein on The Rumpus!

Rumpus logo Huge thanks to poet and writer Michael Klein for this thoughtful, smart review of The Cloud That Contained the Lighting appearing on The Rumpus!

 

From the review: “What The Cloud That Contained the Lightning becomes – through its somewhat fragmented and compelling five-act structure (with the wonderfully compelling section titles: “Fission”, “Trinity”, “Match in One Hand”, “The Art of Surrender” and “Clean Hands”) – is a collection of mostly declarative poems that take the invention of the bomb and uses it as a way to talk about what happens to any of us when we depart the precincts of our more rational, empathetic consciousness; when we are driven (by who or what, no one seems to know), to have a family, to have love, and still somehow also be responsible for creating something that can end to human life on an apocalyptic scale.”

The Cloud That Contained the Lightning now available on Amazon!

Due out September 15th from the University of Georgia Press, The Cloud That Contained the Lightning is now available for pre-order from Amazon here! Selected by Nikky Finney, author of Head Off & Split, as part of The National Poetry Series, Finney writes of the book: “In The Cloud That Contained the Lightning the unstable walls of the human heart meet the intimate walls of atomic energy. There is decay. There is bloom. Cynthia Lowen skillfully and fiercely tunnels into the world and mind of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, observes, magi- cally imagines, and then maps forward a critical American life. The historical dust of what intimately did and did not happen in 1945 settles alphabetically on us all. With sensual probing and stark probability Lowen and The Cloud That Contained the Lightning resurrect the questions that human beings will forever face and only clear lovely poetry can answer: What can we see from where we stand? Whose fingers clutch the ropes that could always drop the curtain? We need this graceful work.” Order your copy today!