about:blank: Poems

by Tracy Fuad

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.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published October 19, 2021

Reviews

[George Abraham · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[(Tracy's) Book Balderdash]

Been 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.