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about:blank: Poems
Gold Winner, 2022 Nautilus Book Award
In about:blank , Tracy Fuad builds a poetics of contemporary dissociation. Funny, plaintive, and cutting, this formally inventive debut probes alienation in place and in language through the author’s consideration of her own relationship to Iraqi Kurdistan. about:blank —the title of which is the universal URL for a blank web page—complicates questions of longing and belonging. Interrogating the language of internet chatrooms, Yelp reviews, and the Kurdish dictionary, the poems here leap surprisingly between subjects to find new meaning.
Written before and during the years the author spent living in Iraqi Kurdistan, the collection documents the alienation of being inside, outside, and between language(s) and the always-already terror of grammar. At once haunted and humorous, about:blank inhabits and exhibits the disorientation and fragmentation that is endemic to the internet era, and mourns the loss of a more embodied existence.
In about:blank , Tracy Fuad builds a poetics of contemporary dissociation. Funny, plaintive, and cutting, this formally inventive debut probes alienation in place and in language through the author’s consideration of her own relationship to Iraqi Kurdistan. about:blank —the title of which is the universal URL for a blank web page—complicates questions of longing and belonging. Interrogating the language of internet chatrooms, Yelp reviews, and the Kurdish dictionary, the poems here leap surprisingly between subjects to find new meaning.
Written before and during the years the author spent living in Iraqi Kurdistan, the collection documents the alienation of being inside, outside, and between language(s) and the always-already terror of grammar. At once haunted and humorous, about:blank inhabits and exhibits the disorientation and fragmentation that is endemic to the internet era, and mourns the loss of a more embodied existence.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
Published October 19, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 1, 2021
This book is BEYOND. Very hard to describe succinctly given its vast scope: poems both computationally and ecologically inspired, speaking both intimately and beyond the failed imaginations of country, poems interested in form, glitch, & experimentation as much as they are interested in the (dis)embodiments of language itself. Folks who liked LOOK by Solmaz Sharif will likely be a big fan of this book- this is a book I'm gonna be thinking about & carrying with me into my classrooms & my own work forever <3
October 21, 2025
Stunning, uncomfortable poetries of displacement –– political, geographic, digital, social. Fuad does something I love dearly in poetry, which is retaining a poem's seriousness and intensity while incorporating a conversational, almost ironic tone. In about:blank in particular, this practice results in poems both highly specific (and, dare I say, millennial) and also trans-temporal, timeless.
There is a lot to be written about this book, and someday I might write it. What strikes me now is the deftness with which Fuad handles being descended from a people, from a land, under erasure (sous rature) –– Kurdistan –– and the way this personal and creative genealogy carries through each poem, and through each delicately placed and perpetually inadequate word that we as the audience are responsible for understanding as a gestalt.
There is a lot to be written about this book, and someday I might write it. What strikes me now is the deftness with which Fuad handles being descended from a people, from a land, under erasure (sous rature) –– Kurdistan –– and the way this personal and creative genealogy carries through each poem, and through each delicately placed and perpetually inadequate word that we as the audience are responsible for understanding as a gestalt.
December 11, 2021
So many of my notes in the margins are "YES!" hearts, stars, and exclamation points! This book is brilliant. It's smart AND enjoyable. There is exploration of place, identity and identity formation, contemporary moments, technology, media, cultural representation, and so much more. It's the first book of poetry I've ever read that explores the experience of a queer, Kurdish-American woman... and that is so valuable for me to see in itself but especially in a book that is so fantastically crafted.
May 11, 2026
Future Conditional
If you have your arms crossed in two weeks.
If there is a cursor hovering over your chin.
If in a language that does not interest me.
If you have passed with two weeks.
If you have a seat on your floor.
If in a language that is not relevant to me.
If you go for two weeks.
If a sitting is on the ground.
If I have a link in a language.
If you go for two weeks.
If the sitting is on the ground.
If I have a language in a language. (22)
Object Exercise
First you must gather the objects.
Open the polish and polish each object
until every object is coated in polish,
a thin film that takes on the shape
of the object. Then dissect every
object with a circumstantial blade.
When the object is fully dissected,
remake it, but more in your image.
Then use concise scissors to prune
the object, removing what wilts
or yellows. Turn up the object
sound. Then, dissect again. Hold
each piece to check for resistance:
if it withers, it’s an object.
If it shudders, it’s a subject. (31)
Objet
by nature the door at the back of my closet is flat
and performs a traditional space between ex-
and interior revealing when open a threshold
consisting of surface increasing in height
incrementally colloquially known as a staircase
this one fashioned of mud-bricks baked sometime
before I was born or conceived of sometimes
it dawns on my how much of my life has little
or nothing to do with me I’m fairly sure
that “I” only exist in the place that “I” actually am
well “I”’m gonna weave now a little replacement
of me and I hope to include that bite mark
a bloom on the rearest of me never again
to be legible after being cut from the loom (67)
from eject
I am trying to cultivate the feeling of being my-own-witness
But this planet will be forgotten
I am done with nostalgia, the human said, but what shall I put in its place?
The other asked, would you do it all again?
A pause: of course implies matter of course implies automation
So no, I could not bear the preternatural earth
A series of rooms abutting rooms abutting lesser oceans
All else contained in my interior sea
So we speak through a machine, unsure of what it is we want
Algorithms in a second floor tea shop of the old world’s erstwhile seat
A leaping at; a flashing by and gone
I watch the hot plates of the laminator seal each word
The affirmative names of other planets
The gloves I wore or that wore me, hands jammed into a different hologram
I didn’t come here not to find you
The earth’s last snow gridding the air
Beyond, a pulse of coursing blankness
The damp behind each original
A human calling me forward and into the unfruited future
All the chokeberries gone a green-white of beforeness
The storm a program ticking
My vine gone taut with ripe need, a menu of desire (73)
A Color Named After A Fruit
Before oranges were sweet, they were bitter.
The whole world was bitterer then.
Nights, unlit; wheat wild.
Each element, bound in its own rind.
And then you were there, in the rift cut out of mountain.
Your mouth with its triangle-window.
In the garden, the branches were dropping their blossoms.
Then bending with citrus, laden with sun-weight.
We could sit and watch the fruit go orange,
the hue that moved through five tongues to get to ours.
Let the moon go ochre. Your milky teeth
soft at my bared silk.
A hummed line. The thrum of the primary colors.
Beneath the pith, the pulp. (99)
from Material Culture
We made a vast but empty continent between us where to put the unsayable.
It was important to keep the unsayable firmly unsaid.
The towns we passed were pink and humble.
This is a country made of plaster and an alien economy, ridden with categories of absence.
The center was blundering through the extremities, totally lost.
On that hill, I will put my emotions.
Here is the blistering light that I mentioned.
Here is a table of splendor. Here, we have décor.
How could we have spoiled this place with such dedication?
This is an offering to the unmappable other.
Beneath me there is a rigid grid, but I swear I have nothing to do with it. (102)
If you have your arms crossed in two weeks.
If there is a cursor hovering over your chin.
If in a language that does not interest me.
If you have passed with two weeks.
If you have a seat on your floor.
If in a language that is not relevant to me.
If you go for two weeks.
If a sitting is on the ground.
If I have a link in a language.
If you go for two weeks.
If the sitting is on the ground.
If I have a language in a language. (22)
Object Exercise
First you must gather the objects.
Open the polish and polish each object
until every object is coated in polish,
a thin film that takes on the shape
of the object. Then dissect every
object with a circumstantial blade.
When the object is fully dissected,
remake it, but more in your image.
Then use concise scissors to prune
the object, removing what wilts
or yellows. Turn up the object
sound. Then, dissect again. Hold
each piece to check for resistance:
if it withers, it’s an object.
If it shudders, it’s a subject. (31)
Objet
by nature the door at the back of my closet is flat
and performs a traditional space between ex-
and interior revealing when open a threshold
consisting of surface increasing in height
incrementally colloquially known as a staircase
this one fashioned of mud-bricks baked sometime
before I was born or conceived of sometimes
it dawns on my how much of my life has little
or nothing to do with me I’m fairly sure
that “I” only exist in the place that “I” actually am
well “I”’m gonna weave now a little replacement
of me and I hope to include that bite mark
a bloom on the rearest of me never again
to be legible after being cut from the loom (67)
from eject
I am trying to cultivate the feeling of being my-own-witness
But this planet will be forgotten
I am done with nostalgia, the human said, but what shall I put in its place?
The other asked, would you do it all again?
A pause: of course implies matter of course implies automation
So no, I could not bear the preternatural earth
A series of rooms abutting rooms abutting lesser oceans
All else contained in my interior sea
So we speak through a machine, unsure of what it is we want
Algorithms in a second floor tea shop of the old world’s erstwhile seat
A leaping at; a flashing by and gone
I watch the hot plates of the laminator seal each word
The affirmative names of other planets
The gloves I wore or that wore me, hands jammed into a different hologram
I didn’t come here not to find you
The earth’s last snow gridding the air
Beyond, a pulse of coursing blankness
The damp behind each original
A human calling me forward and into the unfruited future
All the chokeberries gone a green-white of beforeness
The storm a program ticking
My vine gone taut with ripe need, a menu of desire (73)
A Color Named After A Fruit
Before oranges were sweet, they were bitter.
The whole world was bitterer then.
Nights, unlit; wheat wild.
Each element, bound in its own rind.
And then you were there, in the rift cut out of mountain.
Your mouth with its triangle-window.
In the garden, the branches were dropping their blossoms.
Then bending with citrus, laden with sun-weight.
We could sit and watch the fruit go orange,
the hue that moved through five tongues to get to ours.
Let the moon go ochre. Your milky teeth
soft at my bared silk.
A hummed line. The thrum of the primary colors.
Beneath the pith, the pulp. (99)
from Material Culture
We made a vast but empty continent between us where to put the unsayable.
It was important to keep the unsayable firmly unsaid.
The towns we passed were pink and humble.
This is a country made of plaster and an alien economy, ridden with categories of absence.
The center was blundering through the extremities, totally lost.
On that hill, I will put my emotions.
Here is the blistering light that I mentioned.
Here is a table of splendor. Here, we have décor.
How could we have spoiled this place with such dedication?
This is an offering to the unmappable other.
Beneath me there is a rigid grid, but I swear I have nothing to do with it. (102)
Did Not Finish
December 11, 2023Been on my tbr for years and years and saw a free sample as I've been going Kindle crazy the past week or 2. Gave the sample a taste it is a very poetry-y book. Personally, I had to strain to find meaning and that's just not what I'm in the mood for at the moment.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews