A slide show in poems documenting the ruin wrought by war and inequality on those who defy the status quo. In Guidebooks for the Dead, Cynthia Cruz returns to a familiar literary landscape in which a cast of extraordinary women struggle to create amidst violence, addiction and poverty. For Marguerite Duras, evoked here in a collage of poems, the process of renaming herself is a "Quiet death, " a renewal she envisions as vital to her evolution. In "Duras (The Flock), " she is "high priestess" to an imagined assemblage of women writers for whom the word is sustenance and weapon, "tiny pills or bullets, each one packed with memory, packed with a multitude of meaning." Joining them is the book's speaker, an "I" who steps forward to declare her rightful place among "these ladies with smeared lipstick and torn hosiery . . . this parade of wrong voices." Guidebooks for the Dead is both homage to these women and a manifesto for how to survive in a world that seeks to silence those who resist"--