Cindy Day has published in the Green Mountains Review, Southern Poetry Review, Nine Mile, and The Healing Muse, among other magazines. Four of her poems appear in Last Call: Poems of Alcoholism, Addiction and Deliverance, edited by Sarah Gorham & Jeffrey Skinner, Sarabande Books, 1997. In 2008 she won the Emerging Poet Award from Stone Canoe Magazine, Syracuse University. Most recently she participated in the PRO program at the Downtown Writer's Center in Syracuse, NY. A native of Hartford, Connecticut and a graduate of the University of Hartford, she has lived and worked in Central New York since 1974. Since the age of 16, writing, primarily poetry, has been at the center of her life. She has also worked in retail, as an office administrator for a nonprofit and in medical offices. She has written and edited three area newsletters, and has been involved in her community for many years as a volunteer for such organizations as Hospice, the Utica Public Library and AA and Al Anon. Currently, she serves on the board for The Center for Family Life & Recovery in Utica, New York, where she lives with her husband.
Cindy Day revisits the sometimes disappointing, sometimes devastating scenes of memory in order to recover and redistribute love. Twice a year, sometimes more, / I drive from my present into my past, she writes in the first poem in the collection, and a few stanzas later, almost humorously, I practice lowering my expectations. But as Day writes bravely and sometimes ironically through a process of recovery, she reveals that her speakers need not travel back in time to re-discover old losses. Alienation and fear arise often in the lived, moment-to-moment mundanity of sober life. And when a speaker claims with slight disbelief, It must be me / you love, we know this as a fundamental, healing self-love. And Day is right, Love is too small a word for it. Indeed, these poems finally enact a courageous acceptance. -Jesse Nissim, author of Day cracks between the bones of the foot This is a book about returning, returning to the mystery of a wounded childhood, returning to examine the inescapable legacy of inherited alcoholism, returning to say "all the things that could never be said." Cindy Day's lyric narratives take us on a journey toward healing and forgiveness, toward making restitution, not only to others who might've been hurt along the way, but to the restored self who, in the end, can finally say "yes." How fortunate we are to encounter such wisdom, and generosity of spirit. -Eileen Moeller, author of Firefly, Brightly Burning "Fear is a story I tell myself," the narrator of Amends tells us. It is a painful but poised story in this graceful first collection of poems. Through a childhood where "being herself / is wrong" and adulthood battles with alcoholism, these poems are crafted with a quiet bravery that belies their protagonist's uncertainties. "Who would I be if I were not this / ratty victim?" she asks in the title poem-then shows us, in the book's moving and assured conclusion. Amends is an impressive debut. -Philip Memmer, author of The Storehouses of the Snow
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