Cindy Huyser worked at Holly Street Power Plant in Austin, where she became the first woman to be a power plant control board operator and power plant operations supervisor.

She continues to live in Austin, where she now makes her living as a computer programmer. She served as co-editor for the Texas Poetry Calendar (2009 through 2014 editions) for Dos Gatos Press, and since 2011 has hosted a monthly poetry reading and open mic at BookWoman in Austin.

Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Layers (Plain View Press, 1994) in which twenty of her poems are published.

POETRY

Cindy Huyser

Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems

Co-winner of the Blue Horse Press Chapbook Contest, 2014

Paperback, 978-0692249963, 36 pgs., $10.00

August 2014

Cindy Huyser’s debut chapbook invites readers into a Dantesque world few followers of contemporary poetry have ever witnessed in person: a fifteen-story-tall circa-1960 electric generating facility, now decommissioned, in Austin, Texas. Huyser knows her ignitor from her turning gear: she worked there.

The persona in Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems is a tender of the enormous, constantly moving power plant, an operator who sees the aging machine in gynopomorphic terms. We’ve all heard grizzled guys huddled around cars or boats or anything with an engine: She’s a real beaut. Turn her loose, boys. Shut ’er down. The dynamo is always female. Huyser’s is no exception.

But this behemoth is no ordinary V-8. Her valves are capable of “breaking finger bone / in twenty places” (“Blow-out: 0330”), her contacts of pulling a man “through the narrowest of openings / the long half-minute death” (“Lock Out/Tag Out”). She is a decaying maze of boilers, pipes, motors, valves, turbine blades, cuno filters, and “accumulated liquids” (“The Walk-Down”) — as is every human body.

She is life-giving mother; Mary Shelley’s monster, gender-bent (“Turbine Overhaul”); mirage (“The Lady in White”); murderer.

Still, her keeper is smitten, “like a lover / attending the beloved” (“The Walk-Down”), admitting in “Night Shift on the Turbine Floor,” a tribute to Charles Wright’s “Clear Night,” the desire to “be one with this machine: steam-driven, spinning, and shifting.”

The arrangement of this tightly composed collection moves like the plot of a satisfying story, building suspense as pressure gradually inches upward in  “Transformation,” relaxing momentarily in the idyllic, pensive “Night Shift,” and nearly reaching the breaking point in “The Dam” before releasing tension in “Exhalation.” The poems range from spiritual (“the marriage / of commutator and slip ring,” in “Turbine”; the image of the Eucharist, as the “entrant precedes with the oxygen monitor” in “Confined Space Entry”) to the ruggedly mechanical, technical, scientific.

Among this collection, I particularly enjoyed “Confined Space Entry,” its compact form and wry observation reminiscent of Frost or Ryan; “Until the Outage,” a carpe diem at once a grotesque and gentle; and the title sonnet, “Burning Number Five,” with its well-oiled rhythm and precision-milled end and internal rhyme.

Burning Number Five drives the reader to consider mere humanity in light of the big questions governed by the laws of thermodynamics. You remember, from physics class: No energy may be created or destroyed. Everything disintegrates, eventually, into chaos. Huyser deploys her understanding of the mortal coil as masterfully as her knowledge of this complex mechanical system.

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