Tracy Fuad, Portal

 

HYPOSUBJECT

In life, I imbued thingswith a great deal of meaning and purpose.

At times, as ifpossessed.

I wanted to understandreason, but it seemed to gather speed and breadth without
me, as if reason itself,once seeded, began to breathe and grow on its own.

But officials have saidthe hole is perfect.

So now I focus on thepractical use of the past.

The light of day. A bluechair standing before the mirror.

It occurred to me afterthe end, the fifth of that week, arriving when the doors
were closed: I may havedied.

How do you feel when theworld is big inside your head?

Another common moment.

I am very much appreciating the echoes, repetitions and folds in the latest poetrycollection from Berlin-based American poet Tracy Fuad, following about:blank (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], her collection Portal (The University of Chicago Press, 2024).There are such fascinating strands of narrative that swirl and meet acrossthese poems; the way rhythm presents itself across her accumulated,self-contained phrases. Fuad’s poems are expansive, threading a myriad ofarticulations on language, translation, history and culture in poems that stretchout across landscapes far beyond the scope of the page. “At dawn I could make endlessness.And love all night.” she writes, as part of one of the “HYPOSUBJECT” poems, “However,when I stood to go, I couldn’t break into living.”

Setin a quartet of sections—“mortal,” “torpor,” “mortar, pestle”and “portal,” titles that bounce off each other in an effect echoing homolinguistictranslation—Fuad utilizes the shape and scope of the poem to articulatesomething so intimately large as to be difficult to name. “I was slushingaround in my slush. / Who could understand such a thing?” she writes, as partof “THE SIXTH PLANETARY BOUNDARY,” At but one hundred pages, there is suchan enormous sense of scale to this collection, one that feels akin to the widecanvas of the work of Anne Carson, offering the collection as holdingeverything her writing has learned and contained and continued up to that pointin a single offering. The poems are exploratory, examining how one unfolds andunfurls consciousness and human thought, engagement and responsibility. This isa remarkably complex, dense and thoughtful collection, one that requires andrewards both time and attention. As she writes as part of the long poem“BUSINESS”:

It was in the gouging ofthe valley that a trio of human remains was uncovered

Though upon examination,it was determined that the skeletons were not human

Belonging instead to adistinct and extinct species of archaic humans

The species was namedafter the valley

The valley named afterNeader, a man descended from a man who’d changed his
name from Neumann toNeander

Out of reverence,possibly misdirected, for the ancient Greeks

Both names meaning “newman”

I find, at times, thetaste of my own mouth to be abhorrent.