This week, Charif Shanahan speaks with Cynthia Cruz, who joins us from Berlin, Germany. Born on a US military base in Wiesbaden and raised in Northern California, she is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School where her research focuses on Hegel and madness. Cruz is the author of seven poetry collections, as well as two collections of critical work, including The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class. In the book, Cruz writes, “To be working-class in a middle-class world is to be a ghost,” and the book analyzes how the choice between assimilation or annihilation has played out in the lives of working-class musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers. Her newest collection of poems, Back to the Woods (forthcoming from Four Way Books) was written alongside A Manifesto for the Working Class and shares references with it while also circulating around Freud’s concept of the death drive. According to Cruz, “In its simplest iteration the death drive is an attempt to begin again through the act of self annihilation.” Today, we’ll hear two poems from the new collection, including “Dark Register” from the May issue of Poetry.

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