Common Amnesias
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024

Praise for Common Amnesias

"Common Amnesias is thrilling. A dizzying marathon through the taboo, the shamed, the disgusting. Cuff takes us far beyond shock value to deep intimacy. Cuff writes, “Like the word river spelled backwards, I fall into myself.” In her vertigo, shame’s valuables are strapped to her chest: desire, depression, shitting, the very act of feeling. As she repeatedly fails to secure a railing, we overhear her urgency; not just to survive this life, but to properly care for it. Common Amnesias gripped me, challenged me, & provoked my stitching to come undone. I simply have never read anyone like Cuff.

— Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium

Alex Cuff's Common Amnesias is a profound thinking-through of family—what it walls off, what it papers over, and the wondrous precarity of what's left. Cuff's book is full of wonderfully sharp, quick-witted associations that comment hilariously on the uselessness of the shame they'd have you layer ("when i was nine i said hi in the mirror and was embarrassed"). Or maybe it's not about family at all, but the intelligence that persists beyond anything that would dull it, all those obstacles like "chairs from my hips and doors from my wrists / I walk through the house dislodging." Instant classic!

—Jacqueline Waters, author of One Sleeps The Other Doesn’t and Commodore

These communities of text came to be and coalesced through the engine of quiet courage. They are brave and kind amid discomfort; they let shame go its petty distance and no further; they are nimble and patient in search of solutions. Alex Cuff’s debut collection of poems fears no feeling and seeks freedom.

—Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, author of Of Forests and of Farms: On Faculty and Failure

Common Amnesias is quest through the underworld meets game night. This book points to behaviors that can't be called love or nature, the operations of the body, and what goes unsaid in families. Alex Cuff questions bravery. Thinking of "all the hamsters who have died without reason" and how "the land grab continues", she assembles things irrelevant enough to be poetry: "spuds", "cigarette money", "electrical tape", and a "bathrobe". And then she declares war.

Joshua Escobar, author of Bareback Nightfall

I Try Out A Sentence To See Whether I Believe
Ghost Proposal, 2020

Family, A Natural Wonder
Reality Beach, 2017

The press is sold out but you can order a copy directly from me. Email me at burgissima @ gmail dot com