Thursday, July 14 at 6:00 pm in the Marc Jacobs Reading Room

Cynthia Bargar will read from her new collection, Sleeping in the Dead Girl's Room on Thursday, July 14 in the Library’s Marc Jacobs Reading Room.  The book is a ghost story, a memoir in poems that grapples with an 18-year-old’s  presumed suicide months before the birth of her niece. They share a name. Engaging with photographs, memories, documents, and a haunting presence, Cynthia Bargar weaves together the unspoken story of her aunt’s death and her own history of mental illness. 

Poet and memoirist Brian Turner called Sleeping in the Dead Girl's Room  "a work that challenges the boundaries of genre while indicting a world that refuses to examine its own culpability in silencing the brave and the vulnerable... This is a courageous book—made to be read in one sitting, made to linger in the imagination."  

Cynthia lives in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including Gargoyle, Rogue Agent, Book of Matches, LUMINA Literary Journal, Comstock Review, Driftwood Press, Loch Raven Review, and Stoneboat Literary Journal. Her prose poem “Beach at St. Mary’s” is included in the new book of images and text, Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits by Barbara E. Cohen (Provincetown Arts Press, 2021). She is associate poetry editor of Pangyrus.