The Salt House is a beautifully observed and written memoir of a long summer's stay on the back shore of Cape Cod. Each chapter is like a prose poem, shedding increasing light on the challenge of finding "home" without the illusion of permanence, a quest based not on ownership but on affinity and familiarity with an area and its people. Cynthia Huntington expands her theme through images of the landscape, the shack, the new marriage.

The shack, named "Euphoria," is built as a house set on stilts above the sand, to take the wind under it. Only a partial shelter, it is inhabited for only...

National BookAward Finalist 2012
In this blistering collection of lyric poems, Cynthia Huntington gives an intimate view of the sexual revolution and rebellion in a time before the rise of feminism. Heavenly Bodies is a testament to the duality of sex, the twin seductiveness and horror of drug addiction, and the social, political, and personal dramas of America in the 1960s.
From the sweetness of purloined blackberries to the bitter taste of pills, the ginger perfume of the Hawaiian Islands to the scream of the winter wind, Huntington s fearless and candid poems offer a feast...

In this bold and ambitious book-length poem, National Book Award finalist Cynthia Huntington explores exile and migration--what it means to lose, seek, and find home in all its iterations--through a polyphonic work, written in multiple voices and evoking the method of Hart Crane's The Bridge or the Nighttown episode in James Joyce's Ulysses. Yet it is also a tough and vernacular work, owing as much to Patti Smith and the Clash as it does to High Modernism.

Again and again the work shows us outsiders forced into metaphorical and literal wildernesses, whether in a retelling...