{"id":509,"date":"2018-12-31T12:35:33","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:35:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=509"},"modified":"2018-12-31T12:35:33","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:35:33","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-barbara-brannon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=509","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Barbara Brannon"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
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Cindy Huyser <\/span>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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Layers <\/span>(Plain View Press, 1994) in which twenty of her poems are published.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span>POETRY<\/p>\n

Cindy Huyser<\/span><\/p>\n

Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems<\/span><\/p>\n

Co-winner of the Blue Horse Press Chapbook Contest, 2014<\/p>\n

Paperback, 978-0692249963, 36 pgs., $10.00<\/p>\n

August 2014<\/p>\n

Cindy Huyser\u2019s debut chapbook invites readers into a Dantesque world<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n

The persona in Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems<\/span> is a tender of the enormous, constantly moving power plant, an operator who sees the aging machine in gynopomorphic terms. We\u2019ve all heard grizzled guys huddled around cars or boats or anything with an engine: She\u2019s a real beaut. Turn her loose, boys. Shut \u2019er down.<\/span> The dynamo is always female. Huyser\u2019s is no exception.<\/p>\n

But this behemoth is no ordinary V-8. Her valves are capable of \u201cbreaking finger bone \/ in twenty places\u201d (\u201cBlow-out: 0330\u201d), her contacts of pulling a man \u201cthrough the narrowest of openings \/ the long half-minute death\u201d (\u201cLock Out\/Tag Out\u201d). She is a decaying maze of boilers, pipes, motors, valves, turbine blades, cuno filters, and \u201caccumulated liquids\u201d (\u201cThe Walk-Down\u201d) \u2014 as is every human body.<\/p>\n

She is life-giving mother; Mary Shelley\u2019s<\/span> monster, gender-bent (\u201cTurbine Overhaul\u201d); mirage (\u201cThe Lady in White\u201d); murderer.<\/p>\n

Still, her keeper is smitten, \u201clike a lover \/ attending the beloved\u201d (\u201cThe Walk-Down\u201d), admitting in \u201cNight Shift on the Turbine Floor,\u201d a tribute to Charles Wright\u2019s<\/span> \u201cClear Night,\u201d the desire to \u201cbe one with this machine: steam-driven, spinning, and shifting.\u201d<\/p>\n

The arrangement of this tightly composed collection moves like the plot of a satisfying story, building suspense as pressure gradually inches upward in\u00a0 \u201cTransformation,\u201d relaxing momentarily in the idyllic, pensive \u201cNight Shift,\u201d and nearly reaching the breaking point in \u201cThe Dam\u201d before releasing tension in \u201cExhalation.\u201d The poems range from spiritual (\u201cthe marriage \/ of commutator and slip ring,\u201d in \u201cTurbine\u201d; the image of the Eucharist, as the \u201centrant precedes with the oxygen monitor\u201d in \u201cConfined Space Entry\u201d) to the ruggedly mechanical, technical, scientific.<\/p>\n

Among this collection, I particularly enjoyed \u201cConfined Space Entry,\u201d its compact form and wry observation reminiscent of Frost<\/span> or Ryan;<\/span> \u201cUntil the Outage,\u201d a carpe diem at once a grotesque and gentle; and the title sonnet, \u201cBurning Number Five,\u201d with its well-oiled rhythm and precision-milled end and internal rhyme.<\/p>\n

Burning Number Five <\/span>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.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lone Star Book Reviews of Texas books appear weekly at LoneStarLiterary.com 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}