Sleeping in the Dead Girl's Room By Cynthia Bargar

"Cynthia Bargar’s Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room explores the interior of the self over the course of a lifetime, tracing the long travail of the self when faced with an imposed multiplicity, a fracturing of identity. The tragic failures of culture, institutions, and medicine itself are laid bare in these pages. Bargar has created 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—as the speaker is warned at one point by an attendant in a mental health facility, “Laugh too loud,/ they take the laugh away.” This is a courageous book—made to be read in one sitting, made to linger in the imagination."— Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country, and Here, Bullet