PORTAL

by Tracy Fuad

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.
 

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

Published February 19, 2024

Reviews

[H · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Are they dangerous to the world, my thoughts of paradise between things?” (14)

“My tools stung me, but sometimes they were obvious” (14)

“What should I say? There is a part of me that isn’t me” (66)

“Once, I’d thought destiny a sort of room that you entered” (70)

“I’d had such a bad girlhood once I was no longer seen as a child/ I didn’t know how to act, feel, see, or be, and nobody told me / I thought myself wholly devoid” (84)

“The source of all change, a pregnant emptiness. According to the poets” (88)

“And the unbowing was there./ And the ecstatic, a humming. / And a great sorrow was there” (95)

[Kelsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was really excited when I picked this one up, but just not to my tastes aesthetically. I didn't care for the cadence, and nearly every line of a poem being capitalized really negatively affects how I read poetry in my head.

[Stacie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for Poetry with Pat in Person!! I had just about given up on this book until Portal. Just about loved all these poems of becoming…a mother…a writer. Especially…
Radicality
Nihilism
Destiny
Abundance
Alphabet

[Jordan Hamel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tracy is a genius

[Mya Matteo]

“We are writing
A history of sleep.
The book predates itself.”

[Katherine]

A lot of interesting pieces to this! Not going to rate it in the algorithm but many things I want to revisit. Mixed feelings about the form, but I always have mixed feelings about free verse poetry.

[Nour · Rating 5 out of 5]

To revisit: Vacuum, Abundance, Beach, Worm

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this collection, the poet seems to be searching for meaning—scrutinizing the body of the text and examining the very words she uses to piece together these observations while also inspecting interstices between the lines, in the margins, and among white spaces for clues—while conducting cavity searches of her own body. Is it a case of tokophobia? (“The source of all change, a pregnant emptiness,” “Change,” p. 88) Or is it bringing a baby into a dystopia that she fears? (“And I wept when I read of a child’s capacity for grief,” “Change,” p. 88) These poems require a forensic analysis to interpret.

“Who will pore over my traces when I’m gone?”
—from “Internet,” p. 86


Favorite Poems:
“Hyposubject [I was always waiting]”
“Radicality”
“Destiny”
“Internet”
“Worm”
“Gong”

[Kian Lavi · Rating 4 out of 5]

feel fortunate that i got to watch tracy read some of these at tamarack in oakland.

she has such a particularly beautiful haunting way with her words, with her reflections on time. read this in one lovely sitting on alameda beach. highly recommend taking a poetry book with you to the water.