Of Annunciations

by Ewa Chrusciel

In her book, Chrusciel maps the biblical event of annunciation onto the current migration crises. Annunciation becomes a symbol of the "yes" that we utter in front of reality, particularly confronted with exiles, strangers--in other words, the other. The book quivers on the brink between openness to the other and the terror the other brings out in us. What does it mean to say "yes" to a stranger? What implications, threats, blessings and responsibilities do "yes" carry? Can we say "yes" to a dislocated soul in order to become more fully who we were meant to be?

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

Published October 3, 2017

Reviews

[Kent]

There is a poetic stance in Chrusciel’s book that reminds me some of Daniel Borzutzky’s The Performance of Becoming Human. Not because she is addressing the calculations of torture, or the thoroughness of coercive power—though the book does serve as a record of power’s capacity to destroy. Instead, it’s the poetic density of language, and the paradox laying at the base of language used to express destitution. In Chrusciel’s case, “You are this, a migrant.” could serve as the book’s litany. Or perhaps “prayer” is the word she would prefer, as it appears in many of her titles. In particular, the types of prayers Syrian migrants might recite while escaping from the war in their country.

But what would any of “this” mean in the migrant’s experience? And how is the poet, Ewa Chrusciel, supposed to accurately capture these experiences so they register a truth to the moment, feel immersed in the this tragic fact of the moment, and also imaginatively project into the moment so we, as readers, can see how much the poet understands even as she herself has not experienced that moment? This, for me, is the point of greatest tension for the book. Mainly because of the book’s ambition and the frame that ambition works with.

Its most ambitious move, I would say, is Chrusciel’s use of the “dybbuk.” According to Jewish mystical legend, this is the displaced soul of a dead person. If the destiny of these migrants killed during their passage is to possess those who are still living (as a dybbuk would), the question for the book is what that possession would be like. How would it occupy the living? And how can Chrusciel’s appropriation of these figures be reconfigured while also nodding to their original configuration? I would say the book succeeds in its use of dybbuks, at least how this figure would characterize death. It’s a darkness. It possesses the darkest parts of nature. It inhabits the waters as though the sea had trees growing beneath its surface, with the tree’s branches bifurcating into a thick population charting the undercurrents. The language and imagery used to portray the mass deaths resulting from these migrants’ passages is startling.

Add to this the poet positioning herself as witness to all of this. In the recurring “volunteer” poems, Chrusciel is among the migrants, present to the particular circumstances they suffer from. Between the “volunteer” and the omniscient-ish speaker who accounts for the fate of these dybbuk souls, there is an elaborate political accounting. It gives voice to those wronged by these circumstances and the violence attendant to them.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was glad to read a book of stories of human migration. Refugees, desperate and hopeful. In clear verse. By a poet and translator bilingual in Polish.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Ewa Chrusciel's Of Annunciations, the many ways the poems foreground migrants and migration, with language at turns whimsical, elegiac, rhapsodic, and always lyrical.