Description: A poetry collection exploring inheritance and reproduction through the lenses of parenthood, etymology, postcoloniality, and climate anxiety.
Tracy Fuad's second collection of poems, PORTAL, probes the fraught experience of bringing a new life into a world that is both lush and filled with gloom. A baby is born in a brutalist building; the planet shrinks under the new logic of contagion; roses washed up from a shipwreck centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. PORTAL documents a life that is mediated, even at its most intimate moments, by flattening interfaces of technology and in which language--and even intelligence--is no longer produced only by humans. The voices here are stalked by eco-grief and loneliness, but they also brim with song and ecstasy, reveling in the strangeness of contemporary life while grieving losses that cannot be restored. Through Fuad's frank, honest poetry, PORTAL vibrates with pleasure and dread. Peeling back the surfaces of words to reveal their etymologies, Fuad embraces playfulness through her formal range, engaging styles from the tersely lineated to the essayistic as she intertwines topics of replication, reproduction, technology, language, history, and biology.Brief description: Tracy Fuad is the author of about: blank, a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the winner of the Donald Hall Prize. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and the Berlin Senate Fund. She lives in Berlin, where she teaches at the Berlin Writers' Workshop.
Review Quotes: "The gene-editing technology CRISPR works by looking for palindromes in genetic code, snipping the line just there, and splicing in new material. I thought of this while reading Fuad's PORTAL--how sound and thought and poetry arrive, split us open, and go off somewhere else, and we are the point of that snip, that splice, that split, rather than anything's origin. But who is doing the snipping--the fates, the gods, the rich? The sheer, mercurial stuff of PORTAL will synch you to its thinking til you wake with your locks in the sink and the shears in your hand."--Joyelle McSweeney, author of "Toxicon and Arachne"