Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room by Cynthia Bargar

Cynthia Bargar’s Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room explores the interior of the self over the course of a lifetime, tracing the long travail of the self when faced with an imposed multiplicity, a fracturing of identity. The tragic failures of culture, institutions, and medicine itself are laid bare in these pages. Bargar has created a work that challenges the boundaries of genre while indicting a world that refuses to examine its own culpability in silencing the brave and the vulnerable—as the speaker is warned at one point by an attendant in a mental health facility, “Laugh too loud,/ they take the laugh away.” This is a courageous book—made to be read in one sitting, made to linger in the imagination. 

—Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country, and Here, Bullet

About the Author

Cynthia Bargar’s poems have appeared in Rogue Agent, Book of Matches, LUMINA, Comstock Review, Driftwood Press, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and other journals. Her prose poem, “St. Mary’s Beach,” is included in the new book of images and text, Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits by Barbara Cohen, published by Provincetown Arts Press. Bargar is associate poetry editor at Pangyrus LitMag. She lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts with cartoonist Nick Thorkelson.