"This is a magnificent work, focused on the history of an all but sea-surrounded town. The poet [tells] stories through many voices, from the elevated language of creation myth and prophetic rebuke, to vivid, realistic barroom scenes, hapless and violent, mediated through a voice of personal account and self-accounting. . . . It is one poem with many poems (some of them in prose) carried through the passionate singing rhythm of these voices, becoming the one grand poem that is the book."
–David Ferry, author,
Bewilderment, and winner, National Book Award in Poetry
"Provincetown is the locus of this ambitious, wide-ranging, and archetypal collection, which takes up various histories of migration and exile and reimagines them for our time.
Terra Nova has the feeling of a biblical prophecy, a lost book that has washed up from the sea."
–Edward Hirsch, author,
Gabriel: A Poem "Provincetown is a place both mythic and mystical, and Cynthia Huntington is a someone who gets this right. The land's end, the outermost places here, are never mere geography but the far reaches of history and psyche. Experience, however epic or quotidian, appears heightened in a phosphorescent shimmer from the wilding Atlantic. This cold fire pervades Huntington's diction and rhythms, which press hard against the limits of what can be put into language. She quails at nothing, she excludes nothing, and in her deft hand, this cape's furthest outpost becomes a vortex swallowing the world and time.
Terra Nova sojourns everywhere and is peopled by multitudes–by fishermen and fishermen's wives, the Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers, refugees, wanderers, prophets of the Old Testament, nomads of prehistory and more. It is impossible to catalog the dimensions of this book, and that is its magic and wonder. This is an astonishing achievement, a magnum opus. Open its covers and you may not surface for days."
–Frank X. Gaspar, author,
Late Rapturous
