Tracy Fuad, Portal

 

HYPOSUBJECT

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

At times, as if possessed.

I wanted to understand reason, 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 said the hole is perfect.

So now I focus on the practical use of the past.

The light of day. A blue chair standing before the mirror.

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

How do you feel when the world is big inside your head?

Another common moment.

I am very much appreciating the echoes, repetitions and folds in the latest poetry collection 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 across these poems; the way rhythm presents itself across her accumulated, self-contained phrases. Fuad’s poems are expansive, threading a myriad of articulations on language, translation, history and culture in poems that stretch out 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.”

Set in a quartet of sections—“mortal,” “torpor,” “mortar, pestle” and “portal,” titles that bounce off each other in an effect echoing homolinguistic translation—Fuad utilizes the shape and scope of the poem to articulate something so intimately large as to be difficult to name. “I was slushing around in my slush. / Who could understand such a thing?” she writes, as part of “THE SIXTH PLANETARY BOUNDARY,” “I had been trained my whole life / for this wanting.” At but one hundred pages, there is such an enormous sense of scale to this collection, one that feels akin to the wide canvas of the work of Anne Carson, offering the collection as holding everything her writing has learned and contained and continued up to that point in a single offering. The poems are exploratory, examining how one unfolds and unfurls consciousness and human thought, engagement and responsibility. This is a remarkably complex, dense and thoughtful collection, one that requires and rewards both time and attention. As she writes as part of the long poem “BUSINESS”:

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

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

Belonging instead to a distinct and extinct species of archaic humans

The species was named after the valley

The valley named after Neader, a man descended from a man who’d changed his
name from Neumann to Neander

Out of reverence, possibly misdirected, for the ancient Greeks

Both names meaning “new man”

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