For Literary Hub I reviewed seven new poetry books: Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies, Tracy Fuad’s Portal, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s Watchnight, Dorianne Laux’s Life on Earth, Gregory Pardlo’s Spectral Evidence, Abigail Parry’s I Think We’re Alone Now, and Katie Peterson’s Fog and Smoke.
Here is my review of Tracy Fuad’s Portal (University of Chicago Press):
“I generated faces of people that didn’t exist,” Tracy 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.
The method is often propulsive but blithely concatenated and sometimes uproariously amusing, as in the poem “Business,” which moves from a grandfather’s garbage company, American Refuse Systems (ARS), to the fact that “arse” was “once considered a polite term for buttocks” to a view of Neanderthals in the Neander Valley. That the reader imagines Fuad telling these stories to her future child inclines the book from the familiar intellectual atrophy of our era (“I could barely think / if I couldn’t also Google”) to the vaster, sacral perceptions she finds, at last, in the birth portal itself: “And the unbowing was there. / And the ecstatic, a humming. / And a great sorrow was there.”
(Photo illustration from the cover of Dorianne Laux’s Life on Earth, W. W. Norton, via Literary Hub.)