PORTAL

by Tracy Fuad

Overview

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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226831534
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	02/19/2024
Series:	Phoenix Poets
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

"Fuad's long lines and monostich stanzas resonate and linger, like an intercity express train in the speaker's new country of residence. From a dazzling array of poetic techniques, Fuad's use of repetition to fashion pitch-perfect lyrics stands out, from tiny syllabic songs—'the inking of a ginkgo leaf'—to complex, emotionally freighted refrains, 'my mother’s mother’s remains remain at the morgue.' . . . For Fuad, language is a stubborn, tangible thing that bruises the body and, as the speaker says, created a 'swollen spot on the roof of my mouth where it met my teeth.' . . . Fuad's captivating poetry is totally her own."

Booklist starred review

PORTAL leads you into a world of objects, songs, slugs, whole days—whose etched precision is haunted by an enormity of hyper- and hypo-sensitized consciousness, of Being, dare I say of Soul—of restless Soul. It is a hot summer. Everyone is being watched. The speaker herself is creeping on the Instagram of her ex. A baby is born. Language itself weighs elegiacally upon a voice whose grammar feels like exile. This is a book of possession and dispossession. A world watching itself dissolve, a heart beating behind the world: wildly awake, and lit by shocking sunlight."

Ariana Reines

"In these precise, measured poems, Fuad brushes up against the (imagined, imposed) limitations of a life that is lived, and observed, and exhausted—and a conduit for more life still. . . .  Evocative and probing, Portal is a collection I will return to for its music and wisdom."

Electric Lit

"PORTAL is remarkably accessible and relatable, yet Fuad’s penchant for the philosophical and teleological ensures that readers come away deeply affected. These are poems that will linger in the mind for days at a time, poems that will fundamentally alter your perception of beginnings (and endings)."

The Poetry Question

"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

"'I generated faces of people that didn’t exist,' Fuad writes, 'and found that I already loved them.' The one beloved person that the speaker generates, like the wormlike figure of a sonogram, is her soon-to-be-born baby, and the 'portal' of the title is both birth itself and the liminal spaces where true meaning is born: in the roots of words ('Worm, from the hypothetical root wer-, to turn, to bend'), in the accidental things of this world (the roses of Cape Cod arriving from a shipwreck), in the linguistic otherness of an Anglophone visitor to Berlin, and in the existential doubt that one must undergo ('the seeds of a nihilism with which I was once well acquainted') to attain sense and value."

on "New Poetry Books to Read in February" LitHub

Named one of their "Favorite Poetry Collections of the Year" for 2024

Literary Hub

One might call PORTAL the present dread of future shock. Fuad’s is a poetry of taut vibration, of quaver or vibrato culminating in a crescendo of unsettled feeling. Powerfully arranging the personal and the public, the poet has set a collection of arguments and dreads, hopes and curiosities that work at micro, meso, and macro levels . . . of anxious bodies at risk and the land as a site of antagonism/estrangement. Fuad seems tonally skeptical that regeneration will save us, in a here and now where and when blight upon arrival and reproduction is ‘the point of a screw.’ (F)utilitarian. Still, PORTAL plays out Fuad’s desire for a child even as she anticipates imminent dispossession. It’s these tightly composed conflicts that make for a dynamic and bracing read of love as accompaniment to dislocation and alienation.

Douglas Kearney

‘I had been trained my whole life for this wanting,’ writes Fuad in this astonishing collection. PORTAL maps the folds and membranes, the sentient recursive topographies of an extraordinary poetic consciousness. A sequence of thought unfolds - line by line - each step bridging voids of reference: the economic, the linguistic, the sensual. We are guided through a dimensional journey over thresholds we were unable to perceive until guided by this poet’s vision.

Monica Youn

Included in the list of "Best New Poetry for Spring" 2024

Little Infinite

"[Fuad's] poems carry you along with plainspoken language and description that at times can almost feel dissociative, a little distant. Then a sharp observation, an unearthing of layers, an unexpected swerve into humor. A subtle buildup into something moving. In the backdrop of PORTAL is the pandemic, pregnancy and the coming of parenthood, the looming ecological crisis, an artist residency. In the foreground is the feeling of being new to a place, and all the observational acuity it affords you—that different kind of attention, and what it makes clear. . . . Ultimately, as [Fuad] notes, PORTAL is a book about the things we inherit—memory, language, culture—and how being in a new place can cast these things into a different relief."

Los Angeles Review of Books

Portal leads you into a world of objects, songs, slugs, whole days—whose etched precision is haunted by an enormity of hyper- and hypo-sensitized consciousness, of Being, dare I say of Soul—of restless Soul. It is a hot summer. Everyone is being watched. The speaker herself is creeping on the Instagram of her ex. A baby is born. Language itself weighs elegiacally upon a voice whose grammar feels like exile. This is a book of possession and dispossession. A world watching itself dissolve, a heart beating behind the world: wildly awake, and lit by shocking sunlight."

author of "A Sand Book" Ariana Reines