Cynthia R. Pratts poems appear in numerous anthologies and journals, including 3rd Wednesday Magazines annual poetry contest addition. An Egg Almost Called Death was designated as a poem of special merit. Willows Wept Review nominated her poem, Body Parts for a 2025 Pushcart Prize. She was Poet Laureate of Lacey, Washington (2022-2026) and is the author of Celestial Drift (2016). @cynthiapratt.bsky.social @cynthiajopratt cynthia.r.pratt

PRAISE:

Cynthia Pratts poetry collection,That Wild Knocking, teems and roils with passion, with the natural world and its startling abundance, with loves succor and complication, and with the inevitable sting of loss. Many of Pratts poems sing of beauty and yearning, of nakedness flagrant as shelled eggs on a platter, and moaning as the only prayer. But this book is a portrait, also, of long life and long love, of our human inability to escape the hard frame / of sadness that comes to define our faces. Though we may all live in the junkyard of bad decisions, Cynthia Pratts gorgeous poems remind us that its possible to go on blazing past even [our] own end.

Francesca Bell, author of What Small Sound

Cynthia PrattsThis Wild Knockingis an honest and gorgeous probing of how our bodies are rigged for reproduction / or mad sex, spanning the speakers lifetime with poems that push and pull against the scaffolding of Hieronymus Boschs triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. These poems delight in scientific knowledge, dance ekphrastic, and sing their own Song of Songs. At times existential, and often achingly intimate, Pratts poems ask us, do bodies stop loving once they split / into nothing more than thought, or vapored air? She shows us that the body at 80, stirred by the scent of jasmine, hums with desire. She hands us an apple, a reminder that hearts never really stop.

Ronda Piszk Broatch, author of Chaos Theory for Beginners

We cant always know where the heart will take us, writes Cynthia R. Pratt, because longing / never satisfies me long enough to cool desire. That desire,That Wild Knockingof the heart, sometimes on heavens heavy doors, brings this poet lush and troubling images from Bosches The Garden of Earthly Delights, among them the recurrent figures of owls that bear omens and forebodings that fill these poems spanning the course of a life. These are poems redolent with sensuality and passion, both as earthly delight and as the landscape of desirelove of her partner and also of parents, children, friends, artists who inspire and provoke. Humans and animals couple in these poems that reflect, at times in scientific terms (the jugular notch, the suprasternal gap), the plot of courtship leading to copulation and inevitably to death. But before then is a life filled with celebration, and we celebrate with Pratt as she braid[s] back / together, the sweet moisture of completeness.

Carolyne Wright, author of Masquerade: a Memoir in Poetry, and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (both from Lost Horse Press).

Poetry is not meant to be easy. And That Wild Knocking, takes us, as women, to the core of our fears. Growing old. Never the most beautiful sister. The line in the poem Mirror Mirror describes a kind of inevitable surrender: I am/ glowing with whatever you want to make of me. Yet, in this volume, divided into sections headed by triptychs from a painting about chaos, the poet dares to enter the confusion as a way of creating an identity of desire even as our bodies betray us. Pratt, a wildlife biologist, often references animal behavior. In this way she makes our rawness natural, even mythic: a mermaid/ in disguise. In the poem, Tongues, she describes how blue whales French kiss, as do bonobo chimps: desire hard as a cramped muscle, craved even when the pain/ is like biting down hard on your own tongue. References to sexuality abound in these pages, desire, longing, passion that doesnt temper with age. In fact is magnified. The author sees it everywhere. In the poem Love Bugs she describes insects whose entire lives consist of copulation. She asserts: we are all alike, flies, grasshoppers, humans. Strength within frailty is another theme. She writes about hearing loss, forgetfulness, timidity. Yet we also find a thread of hope/help from both an elk and a stranger: I cross between life and/ death, a visitor that braces herself to accept kindness/wherever it is offered. Poetry might not be easy, but the best of it is honest. These words are not so much confession as anthem. I hear a yes somewhere in each of these verses. Does life disappoint us? Yes, of course. Are we ready to give in? Never, because that is how/ hearts work, steadily carrying us/ on.

Joanne Clarkson author ofHospice HouseandThe Fates.

That Wild Knocking, the newest poetry collection byCynthia R. Pratts, contains poems of family, poems of place, poems of rich sensuality, all in a glorious manifesting, whether gazing at a painting, a memory, or contemplating being human. These poems, with each turn/of the dial of the imagination, peel away the gauze in one unflinching poem after another, self aware and all-aware. There is tenderness, wisdom and philosophy embedded in language you might hear from a friend telling you, look, see with wonder. Inventing structures faster than reincarnation in poems linked like daisy chains of light,That Wild Knockingalso has quiet, Zen-like messages grounded in the moment even as we pass swiftly through. This is poetry of beingbeing in the world, in the body, in the mind thinking about what its experiencingall in music smooth as sunrise.

Douglas Coleis the author ofDrifter, (2025) Finishing Line Press, andThe Cabin at the End of the World, (2024) Unsolicited Press.

In these poems, you will findCynthia Prattcrossing the Duckabush River, running through a busy intersection in Cairo, opening small jewel-box-like poems about her childhood, and finding the human heart at the center of each enterprise. She has seen a lot, and you will be glad to have her record of these encounters. Her poems have it all: rhythm, music and insight, but especially the startling beauty in the small, modest details, which serve as unexpected, but very welcome, wake-up calls. ReadingCynthia Pratts poems is like standing still in a quiet house as a storm rages furiously above and around you: astonished and grateful.

Timothy Kellyis the author ofArticulation, Stronger, Toccata and Fugue, andThe Extremities.