Heavenly Bodies

"Huntington...does not go easy on the reader. Again and again she comes back to the images of the drug-addled, the lost, the repressed, or the rebel, finding subtle new ways to reconfigure their place in a cold, distant society that seems content to view them as lesser than what they are...Her 'heavenly bodies' are those women who are strong when others might find them to be weak, 'sinners' whose 'sin' is merely the rejection of that which degrades them."—Larry Nolen, OF Blog

"Cynthia Huntington’s Heavenly Bodies is a fearless and exacting exploration of illness, addiction, abuse, and the waning of American idealism. These poems are unblinking in the face of dark subject matter, and surprising in their capacity for hope, for grace. Huntington’s speakers are as vast and compassionate—as empathetic and multitudinous—as Whitman’s, and they sing of the beauty and seductive brutality of survival in a world perpetually 'alight with new dangers.'”—Judges Citation, National Book Foundation 

"Huntington, who can tune a lyric any way she likes, has written exquisite poems, some of which turn tragedy into transcendence...But in this book, we suspect that Huntington is tired of rapture and redemption, and that her real subject is disobedience. Her poems in Heavenly Bodies resist transcendent turns just to please the reader, offering instead the body of the poem as it is, without lipstick or peignoir."—Julia Shipley, Seven Days

“This is a poetry of woundedness and defiance. Heavenly Bodies has a stark integrity in its refusals to beguile or comfort; no one could call it uplifting. Yet there is something bracing, even encouraging, in the hungry survival of this sister of Sylvia Plath and in her self-insistence: I do not give up my strangeness for anyone.”—Mark Halliday

“Cynthia Huntington’s Heavenly Bodies is the most searing and frightening book of poetry I have read in years. The poems arise from pain and illness, from the body’s rebellions and betrayals, and yet they are also curiously exhilarating, even redemptive: perhaps because they are utterly free of self-pity, and find the means—through the sustained ferocity and invention of their language—to transform suffering into a vision so bold it must be called prophetic. Heavenly Bodies is a remarkable collection, on every level."—David Wojahn, author of World Tree