Hotel Oblivion

Trapped inside Hotel Oblivion, Cynthia Cruz’s haunting seventh collection composed of fragments and refrains, is a captivating voice in search of a song, a persona unsure of her own story, a speaker who stalks the streets of Germany, rattling off references to popular French philosophers, militant anarchists, and obscure intelligentsia. The speaker is, by turns, a blond actress, disguised as a blond actress, then disguised as a French actress. She is in hospital. She is imprisoned. If at first the lack of reliable information feels discombobulating, the voice Cruz cultivates proves thoroughly compelling, driving the reader forward through its curated oddity, while leaving truth and certainty tantalizingly out of reach. We catch only brief glimpses of the speaker’s elusive past: her mother abandoned her in a hotel in Berlin that subsequently caught fire; her father disappeared into the desert and returned a changed man. Disappearance is a central theme in this collection, with its “silver grammar of vanish”:

A soft violence
pushing up against me—
soundless,
its static,
satelliting music.

This collection is anchored by fourteen poems titled “Hotel Letter,” which are set in what might be a single hotel room, or a movie set, or various rooms throughout Europe that come to resemble one another. What these rooms have in common is a penchant for stacks of photographs, documents, and sundry personal items:

Red leather suitcase filled with Polaroid
snapshots. Or Novalis, his fragments.
What the body desires but the mind will not
allow. Or else, what the mind wants.
Language—silence and its shattered
iterations.

The incessant returns to the hotel room(s)—both in terms of the physical space and as a site of artistic and spiritual reflection—produce a hypnotic, disorienting effect, recalling the extensive Polaroid archive of German photographer Horst Ademeit, in which he documented the minutiae of his daily life. These poems also remind me of Tracey Emin’s seminal work, “My Bed,” in the way both showcase vulnerable disclosure. But what really holds the book together is an underlying musicality, or what the speaker describes as: 

Tremendous,
and without words, 
the song 

I am never not singing.