In the Event of Full Disclosure

The family connections in Cynthia Atkins' IN THE EVENT OF FULL DISCLOSURE are intimate, both entwining and empowering the rich experience these poems convey. "I've faked it and faked it well./ I hear our ancestors yelling / from the mental ward of hell," declares Cynthia Atkins near the start of IN THE EVENT OF FULL DISCLOSURE, a book that explores what it means when mental illness becomes close as blood. Family offers both comfort and disquiet. In these elegant, beautifully observed poems, Atkins considers the burden of being a daughter, a sibling, a mother, and-most of all-a poet charged with making sense of 'indecipherable lists,' of wars domestic and national, and of the fact that all of us are 'born in a trick of love.'"-Jehanne Dubrow "I like the easy and big-hearted familiarity with the reader that Cynthia Atkins shows in her poetry. She doesn't keep us at arm's length. She invites us right in, an act that lends confidence and helps to break down the barriers between writer and reader. At those moments when the 'small feet / of silence conspire / in your ear' and 'the gibbous moon rises / like an old rubbed coin,' we feel we are right there with her. What a pleasure it is to be in the presence of poetry that is so readable and companionable!"-Richard Tillinghast "Rhapsodic, generous, and seriously witty, this poetry invites us to discover new routes through our dizzying contemporary situation. So much of wide-ranging experience is drawn into this startling poetry-and with such energy. Cynthia Atkins's speakers refuse to let their word-loving heads be pushed underwater by despair. They rise up, their propulsive language bringing to the surface the troubling signs of our time, all the while defying the risks we face, coining phrases (a character acts 'like a freak teapot'), and delivering us at last to intimations about 'the room beyond / the room of knowledge.'"-Lee Upton "Cynthia Atkins' extraordinary collection is a display of precious, vacuum-packed, uranium-heavy poems that still glow in the dark a long time after you have finished reading them, illuminating your heart and guts from the inside."--Seb Doubinsky