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Wound Is the Origin of Wonder: Poems
“This book is an astonishment. In ravishing, formally exploratory poems, Maya C. Popa wields the lyric like a reparative scalpel, evoking wonder and woundedness in equal measure: ‘It’s plain we didn’t see / the future coming,’ she announces. Searching for a spring that brings renewal, lamenting ‘snow / that vanishes with touch,’ her poems register a unique combination of imperilment and possibility, with imagistic precision one can’t forget: ‘A faint hiss―that is / your own life now, hurrying / from one light to another.’ Wound Is the Origin of Wonder reflects to us our own historical moment with unusual clarity, even as its lyric exploration of psychic and social landscapes stand outside of time. This is a book I will return to.” ―Meghan O’Rourke Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection. Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what’s by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin? Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers―John Milton’s visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust―to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past. Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.
96 pages, Hardcover
First published November 8, 2022
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January 31, 2024
‘The wound is where the light enters us.’
I often think that poetry is one of the closest ways we come to magic in life. Poetry, rubbing two words together until they make fire. Something that can warm the heart, spark desires, or simply illuminate the darkness like a torch in the labyrinth of life. Dr. Maya C. Popa is a poet who cultivates and shares this love for the guiding light of poetry. I first discovered her through social media as she maintains an endlessly wonderful twitter feed directing readers towards poems sure to stir the heart, though her own poetry is also a blissful balm on our weary souls. Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, Popa’s follow-up collection to the rightfully applauded American Faith: Poems, traverses the both the grief and joys of life. The word ‘wonder,’ says the book’s epigraph, is thought to derive from the German wunde, where we also get ‘wound,’ and by this logic Popa shows us pain and joy as not opposites but inseparably two sides to the same coin of life. Inevitable experiences we grasp in contrast to one another. These poems flow through these concepts with a tone of acceptance—sometimes tragically—though never resignation, instead always flexing the muscles of hope to crumble the crusts of sorrow that try to harden around our hearts. With poems addressing loss, the recent pandemic, or even ghost crabs and peacocks, Popa’s elegant poetry breaks into the reader like a ray of light through a stormcloud with understanding and encouragement, always questioning amidst all the sadness the world can throw ‘when joy comes, will I be ready, I wonder.’
‘Begin again in darkness, life says sometimes.
Picture the trees burning in autumn,
the earth’s relief, at last, at being fallen.’
I appreciate the way Popa never shirks from hardships and hard subjects yet also never feels bogged down in them either. ‘I have wanted all the world, its beauties / and its injuries,’ she writes n the opening poem Dear Life , and this commitment to the spectrum of experience resonates through the entire collection. Yet it also goes deeper than merely juxtaposes joy and grief, digging into moments of loss to embody the sadness that comes from separation in a finite life to show that it is a risk we take for pursuing joy. ‘A sort of slow vanishing / your image from every vantage / absented,’ Popa writes of a lost love in Longing Explained by William James, and while the tone is somber, it is a reminder that opening ourselves up to the wounds of life is also the only way we can experience wonder. The whole maxim about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all but expanded to a wide variety of experience. We must allow ourselves to lower our armor, give ourselves to the beauty of the world, acknowledge that wounds come with it, yet bravely embarking anyways.
‘The past is a country of held breaths
misread as silence, or the way things
had to be.’
Many of the poems brush on the griefs and separations of the recent COVID years, a time when ‘there was malice, but mostly / a kind of grief,’ as she writes in Late Genesis. There is a plea for ‘anything but illness, I beg the plagues, / but shiny crows or nuclear rain,’ wishing for a tenderness in all the hurt and fear. Popa’s toolbelt of historical allusions tie past and present, creating a timeless quality to her poems that remind us that our experiences are part of a larger human experience that has traversed the timeline of humanity and appeared in many reiterations of the same themes. Her allusions, often Biblical or references to scientific figures, wed ideas of spirituality and science in an interesting way that probe notions of experience that can’t be simply contained and explained within logic or academics.
Which is where the magic of poetry comes in and the ways it can give us an artistic perspective on life that explores meaning in the abstract. ‘I worry I’ll only / have words with which / to tell the story of what mostly / occurred outside language,’ Popa confesses, tapping into the root of the poet’s struggle to use the faulty nets of words to trap the ineffability of life. She wishes ‘to upend beauty for something / approximate,’ or to live life ‘for the ode of it./ The life that can’t be lived behind the eyelids’ It is a lovely sentiment, the idea of being a living poem.
Life is full of pain, but life also goes on, Popa tells us, or better put ‘time persists, yes, I can see there are new branches.’ This collection is absolutely gorgeous, embodying the ‘grains of happiness measured against all the dark’ as Jane Hirshfield writes in her own poem The Weighing. With Popa, we feel it is enough.
5/5
Dear Life
I can’t undo all I have done unto myself,
what I have let an appetite for love do to me.
I have wanted all the world, its beauties
and its injuries; some days,
I think that is punishment enough.
Often, I received more than I’d asked,
which is how this works—you fish in open water
ready to be wounded on what you reel in.
Throwing it back was a nightmare.
Throwing it back and seeing my own face
as it disappeared into the dark water.
Catching my tongue suddenly on metal,
spitting the hook into my open palm.
Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly.
Would you loosen the line—you’ll listen
if I ask you,
if you are the sort of life I think you are.
I often think that poetry is one of the closest ways we come to magic in life. Poetry, rubbing two words together until they make fire. Something that can warm the heart, spark desires, or simply illuminate the darkness like a torch in the labyrinth of life. Dr. Maya C. Popa is a poet who cultivates and shares this love for the guiding light of poetry. I first discovered her through social media as she maintains an endlessly wonderful twitter feed directing readers towards poems sure to stir the heart, though her own poetry is also a blissful balm on our weary souls. Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, Popa’s follow-up collection to the rightfully applauded American Faith: Poems, traverses the both the grief and joys of life. The word ‘wonder,’ says the book’s epigraph, is thought to derive from the German wunde, where we also get ‘wound,’ and by this logic Popa shows us pain and joy as not opposites but inseparably two sides to the same coin of life. Inevitable experiences we grasp in contrast to one another. These poems flow through these concepts with a tone of acceptance—sometimes tragically—though never resignation, instead always flexing the muscles of hope to crumble the crusts of sorrow that try to harden around our hearts. With poems addressing loss, the recent pandemic, or even ghost crabs and peacocks, Popa’s elegant poetry breaks into the reader like a ray of light through a stormcloud with understanding and encouragement, always questioning amidst all the sadness the world can throw ‘when joy comes, will I be ready, I wonder.’
‘Begin again in darkness, life says sometimes.
Picture the trees burning in autumn,
the earth’s relief, at last, at being fallen.’
I appreciate the way Popa never shirks from hardships and hard subjects yet also never feels bogged down in them either. ‘I have wanted all the world, its beauties / and its injuries,’ she writes n the opening poem Dear Life , and this commitment to the spectrum of experience resonates through the entire collection. Yet it also goes deeper than merely juxtaposes joy and grief, digging into moments of loss to embody the sadness that comes from separation in a finite life to show that it is a risk we take for pursuing joy. ‘A sort of slow vanishing / your image from every vantage / absented,’ Popa writes of a lost love in Longing Explained by William James, and while the tone is somber, it is a reminder that opening ourselves up to the wounds of life is also the only way we can experience wonder. The whole maxim about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all but expanded to a wide variety of experience. We must allow ourselves to lower our armor, give ourselves to the beauty of the world, acknowledge that wounds come with it, yet bravely embarking anyways.
‘The past is a country of held breaths
misread as silence, or the way things
had to be.’
Many of the poems brush on the griefs and separations of the recent COVID years, a time when ‘there was malice, but mostly / a kind of grief,’ as she writes in Late Genesis. There is a plea for ‘anything but illness, I beg the plagues, / but shiny crows or nuclear rain,’ wishing for a tenderness in all the hurt and fear. Popa’s toolbelt of historical allusions tie past and present, creating a timeless quality to her poems that remind us that our experiences are part of a larger human experience that has traversed the timeline of humanity and appeared in many reiterations of the same themes. Her allusions, often Biblical or references to scientific figures, wed ideas of spirituality and science in an interesting way that probe notions of experience that can’t be simply contained and explained within logic or academics.
Which is where the magic of poetry comes in and the ways it can give us an artistic perspective on life that explores meaning in the abstract. ‘I worry I’ll only / have words with which / to tell the story of what mostly / occurred outside language,’ Popa confesses, tapping into the root of the poet’s struggle to use the faulty nets of words to trap the ineffability of life. She wishes ‘to upend beauty for something / approximate,’ or to live life ‘for the ode of it./ The life that can’t be lived behind the eyelids’ It is a lovely sentiment, the idea of being a living poem.
Life is full of pain, but life also goes on, Popa tells us, or better put ‘time persists, yes, I can see there are new branches.’ This collection is absolutely gorgeous, embodying the ‘grains of happiness measured against all the dark’ as Jane Hirshfield writes in her own poem The Weighing. With Popa, we feel it is enough.
5/5
Dear Life
I can’t undo all I have done unto myself,
what I have let an appetite for love do to me.
I have wanted all the world, its beauties
and its injuries; some days,
I think that is punishment enough.
Often, I received more than I’d asked,
which is how this works—you fish in open water
ready to be wounded on what you reel in.
Throwing it back was a nightmare.
Throwing it back and seeing my own face
as it disappeared into the dark water.
Catching my tongue suddenly on metal,
spitting the hook into my open palm.
Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly.
Would you loosen the line—you’ll listen
if I ask you,
if you are the sort of life I think you are.
January 12, 2023
The deep irony here is that much of what the author describes is how there isn't language to describe all of our experiences. There is so much I want to say about this little volume of poems, but I don't have, or can't find, the right words, except to say that the poet grabbed me, and has a talent for zeroing in on this complicated historical time of love, loss, trepidation, nostalgia, grief, and hope.
September 15, 2022
Once again, Popa perfectly displays her ability to document experiences and thoughts in a way that is profoundly deep.
As someone who does not have the patience to untangle jargon, I often find myself revisiting her poems simply because they are accessible to the ‘regular reader’ and can also be enjoyed by the seasoned poetry buff. I enjoy the perfect balance of thought provocation and the careful telling of, a lot of times shared, experiences. Her newest book did not disappoint.
I highly recommend Aquarium, They Are Building A Hospital and Letter To Noah’s Wife to start, but there is not one poem in this book that you will not come away with at least a few moments of introspection.
As someone who does not have the patience to untangle jargon, I often find myself revisiting her poems simply because they are accessible to the ‘regular reader’ and can also be enjoyed by the seasoned poetry buff. I enjoy the perfect balance of thought provocation and the careful telling of, a lot of times shared, experiences. Her newest book did not disappoint.
I highly recommend Aquarium, They Are Building A Hospital and Letter To Noah’s Wife to start, but there is not one poem in this book that you will not come away with at least a few moments of introspection.
October 1, 2024
Highlights: “Margravine,” “The Owl,” “The Peacocks,” “The Scores,” “After a Vase Broken by Marcel Proust,” “A Humbling,” and bits of the running title poem “Wound Is the Origin of Wonder”
January 10, 2023
“The past is a country of held breaths / misread as silence, or the way things / had to be.” Maya C Popa’s second collection, Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, snuck in at the last minute to be my favourite poetry collection of 2022. As with all of her work, it gestures frequently beyond itself, metaphysical and spiritual even in its moments involved with interiority and personhood. “I’ve shot my arrow / and lived by its arc // and still, the hours / won’t acquit.” I enjoyed revisiting all the poems which had appeared in Dear Life — some, like ‘Milton Visits Galileo in Florence’, find themselves quite changed (the form and even the title of that poem being different across the two publications). And of course I enjoyed the glorious array of completely new poems: a trio of titular poems (only one of which appeared in Dear Life); ‘All That Is Made’, about my beloved Julian of Norwich; the gorgeous and sparse ‘Not the Wound, but What the Wound Implies’; ‘All Inner Life Runs at Some Delay’; the lovely poem ‘Letters in Winter’, with its Christmassy setting; and, one of my all-time favourite poems, with its focus on climate change and grief, ‘Letter to Noah’s Wife’, pure astonishment. I was moved by post-pandemic resonances in ‘Pestilence’: “Life was contagion; everything was life”, and “It happened to us all, this life.” There is much to say and more to love about Popa’s work, which to me is a spiritual successor to Mary Oliver’s work that is also informed by more classical figures like Donne and Keats. The book’s third part, focused on doom but also the transition from Winter to Spring, embodies Popa’s work. “When joy comes, will I be ready, I wonder.”
December 21, 2022
Truly an incredible and weighty work of poetry. A manifesto for endurance and sacred wonder in life’s scattered moments. So grateful to have read.
January 11, 2025
January 2025 | 2nd Read
Is it possible that I screamed more this time? Poems that are for sure winter poems but not without the angst hope of blue hour. Imagine describing pain as “a gift / broken by the time / it reaches us” (from “Not the Wound But What the Wound Implies”). Or describing time in terms of fractures and flowers and fishbones? Or “latitudes of loss” as in “After A Vase Broken By Marcel Proust.” Goodness. And yet joy is coming! These poems do not despair despite their visceral terms of grief.
September 2023 | 1st Read
I kept swearing (gently) and laughing (dryly, like coughing) because these poems have a lot of audacity being so real, and sometimes there are no other actions to cope without crying.
Is it possible that I screamed more this time? Poems that are for sure winter poems but not without the angst hope of blue hour. Imagine describing pain as “a gift / broken by the time / it reaches us” (from “Not the Wound But What the Wound Implies”). Or describing time in terms of fractures and flowers and fishbones? Or “latitudes of loss” as in “After A Vase Broken By Marcel Proust.” Goodness. And yet joy is coming! These poems do not despair despite their visceral terms of grief.
September 2023 | 1st Read
I kept swearing (gently) and laughing (dryly, like coughing) because these poems have a lot of audacity being so real, and sometimes there are no other actions to cope without crying.
December 5, 2024
— “The first thing
to go when I shut the book between us
is the book; silence, its own alphabet,
and still something so dear about it.
It will be spring, I say over and over.
I’ll ask that what I lost not grow back.
I see how winter is forbidding:
it grows the heart by lessening everything else
and demands that we keep trying.”
to go when I shut the book between us
is the book; silence, its own alphabet,
and still something so dear about it.
It will be spring, I say over and over.
I’ll ask that what I lost not grow back.
I see how winter is forbidding:
it grows the heart by lessening everything else
and demands that we keep trying.”
March 14, 2023
Gorgeous poetry. Each poem in WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER is my new favorite poem. Each poem speaks to living past the pain of whatever your original wound was, "and with it / the peculair compulsion to keep living." I recognize her invocation to my younger self, "I've buried you each day / in the dirt of a life I keep tilling." Somehow Maya C. Popa has figured out the alchemy among image, lyrical line, and emotion. I wish I knew what it was, but I'll gladly accept her masterful poems as testimony to the wonder of life's paradox.
March 14, 2023
Popa writes with unyielding clarity in her second book of poems -- "The first time we met/we said goodbye,/then we never stopped/saying it." This is a book filled with light beyond grief and pain. It insists on wonder; that in the face of great fear, there is a lyric and piece of wisdom to be found. At heart, in this book, Popa demonstrates herself to be a writer of deep humanity. Now more than ever, poems like this are essential.
"But oh, to understand us,/ any one of us, and not to grieve?"
"But oh, to understand us,/ any one of us, and not to grieve?"
March 10, 2023
A thoroughly wonderful book, lovely and generous, beautiful.
December 7, 2022
From my review at New York Journal of Books:
In Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, Popa's elegant and moving exploration of grief and its causes and manifestations is more nuanced than simply observing that loss and living go hand-in-hand. A loose narrative unfolds through the collection, beginning with a number of lyric poems touching on separation from an intimate other, as in “Longing Explained by William James”: "a sort of slow vanishing/your image from every vantage/absented.”
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
In Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, Popa's elegant and moving exploration of grief and its causes and manifestations is more nuanced than simply observing that loss and living go hand-in-hand. A loose narrative unfolds through the collection, beginning with a number of lyric poems touching on separation from an intimate other, as in “Longing Explained by William James”: "a sort of slow vanishing/your image from every vantage/absented.”
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
December 1, 2022
Favorite is "Dear Life" — love every line of that one. Other favorites include "Genii Loci," "Reading," "The Scores," the "Wound is the Origin of Wonder" poem on p. 54, "Letter to Noah's Wife," "Milton Visits Galileo in Florence," "Ghost Crabs," and "There Must Be a Meaning." Liked "Pestilence" and the other few poems that alluded to the pandemic, too, but the current public health crisis is still a bit too fresh for me — I will probably really like such poems in about 10 years.
December 11, 2022
This collection is indeed a wonder. It wounds the reader in a wondrous and wonderful manner.. The force and elegance of the language is a poetic ax swung into the hollow of our being. Like the speaker of Virgil's Georgics, the speaker in Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is often, if not always, enchanted with all things alive. Dr. Maya Popa delights us with her sublime breathtaking vision of the world.
November 11, 2022
alright. if I came across another of her books I’d read it probably. wouldn’t shit myself trying to get to the library though. might check it out and keep meaning to read it and never get around to it and turn it in three days early with a promise to revisit it someday.
December 3, 2022
Beautiful. Simply beautiful.
Read
July 30, 2023So visceral. It’s a work that lingers, “turning in you / like a pinwheel still,” as Popa writes, days after reading it.
March 17, 2023
Timely Gift from a Singular Poet Maya Popa
One should whole-heartedly embrace the gift of another Maya Popa book appearance—these poems reflecting the author’s characteristic longing and infinitely mysterious gratitude for the genius of the common place, the daily—the infinitesimal brilliance in enormity and moment of life as it swirls around us while its evil stepsister— cataclysm— blows into smithereens the mundanity of that very life. The clarity and nature of Popa’s perception stops the reader in her proverbial tracks with Popa’s elevation of the ordinary to center stage—making it impossible to ignore— and with her distinct narrative embrace and recognition of horror. Popa refuses to accept the misappropriation of genius in any of its forms and yes –wonder in our world lives on...
Pestilence: “It happened to us all, this life,” “They are building a hospital…;” Proust Breaker of Vases; Dear Life; The Tears of Things’ on the nature of suffering lacrimae rerum; the exquisite Wound verses, Milton Visits Galileo in Florence…. Popa’s awesome independence of mind, frank existential nerve, wit, and steely recognition of what sociologists term “the deformation of the gift” is exciting, resulting in virtuoso and provocative work imbued in mystery, gratitude, and sincerity.
Professor Judith Russell
Columbia University
One should whole-heartedly embrace the gift of another Maya Popa book appearance—these poems reflecting the author’s characteristic longing and infinitely mysterious gratitude for the genius of the common place, the daily—the infinitesimal brilliance in enormity and moment of life as it swirls around us while its evil stepsister— cataclysm— blows into smithereens the mundanity of that very life. The clarity and nature of Popa’s perception stops the reader in her proverbial tracks with Popa’s elevation of the ordinary to center stage—making it impossible to ignore— and with her distinct narrative embrace and recognition of horror. Popa refuses to accept the misappropriation of genius in any of its forms and yes –wonder in our world lives on...
Pestilence: “It happened to us all, this life,” “They are building a hospital…;” Proust Breaker of Vases; Dear Life; The Tears of Things’ on the nature of suffering lacrimae rerum; the exquisite Wound verses, Milton Visits Galileo in Florence…. Popa’s awesome independence of mind, frank existential nerve, wit, and steely recognition of what sociologists term “the deformation of the gift” is exciting, resulting in virtuoso and provocative work imbued in mystery, gratitude, and sincerity.
Professor Judith Russell
Columbia University
February 28, 2023
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is the kind of book you want with you all the time. Open any page and you're guaranteed a precise and unusual image that will make you see the world freshly. For example, I open randomly and read "On the Subject of Butterflies," which begins with the lines "Trying to write about them is hopeless, / Those machinations colluding with air." Isn't that exactly what butterflies are!? Popa begins the book with "Dear Life," that explains "you fish in open water / ready to be wounded on what you reel in." By the end of the poem she's hooked herself or life has and she's asking, "Would you loosen the line?" The movements are breathtaking. In "Longing Explained by William James," she writes, "I met you in a place that is that place / because I met you the spine of English / softening between us." Softening! Do yourself a huge favor and meet Maya C. Popa in Wound Is the Origin of Wonder. You won't read anything better.
June 20, 2025
“When joy comes, will I be ready, I wonder.”
“I see how the winter is forbidding:
it grows the heart by lessening everything else
and demands that we keep trying.”
“How much more will this world enrage us
with its beauty, even as it leans towards last
assessments. And haven’t I minded you like this,
a cartographer patiently charting planets
before going mad with light?”
“The sky filled with stars that had been there already.”
“Noah’s wife, I am wringing
my hands not knowing how to know
and move forward. Was it you
who gathered flowers once they
had dried? How did you explain the light
to all the animals?”
“I’ve shot my arrow and lived by its arc”
“Dear Life” is an incredible poem. I love that it starts the collection.
“I see how the winter is forbidding:
it grows the heart by lessening everything else
and demands that we keep trying.”
“How much more will this world enrage us
with its beauty, even as it leans towards last
assessments. And haven’t I minded you like this,
a cartographer patiently charting planets
before going mad with light?”
“The sky filled with stars that had been there already.”
“Noah’s wife, I am wringing
my hands not knowing how to know
and move forward. Was it you
who gathered flowers once they
had dried? How did you explain the light
to all the animals?”
“I’ve shot my arrow and lived by its arc”
“Dear Life” is an incredible poem. I love that it starts the collection.
February 20, 2023
I like a book of poetry that coheres, and this one does. As I was reading, I was wondering if I could teach it, and I wasn't sure I could because a lot of the poems are cerebral and would frustrate most high school readers, but in the third section they become more topical (global warming, Covid), and I felt that students would be eager to see their own memories and anxieties explored in poetry. They would ultimately feel this is a demanding but rewarding experience.
March 6, 2023
Maya Popa is one of my favorite poets of her generation, and this is an absolute stunner of a collection. The first poem, "Dear Life," deservedly went viral recently, but I think the book is littered with pieces every bit as worthy of wide attention. In fact, to my ears, a lot of these poems sound like classics. Erudite but emotional, always lyrical but never gimmicky. Can't wait for her next book.
May 15, 2023
Wonderfully beautiful collection.
Read
December 23, 2024"We were never / loved by anything // the way tomorrow loved us then." --"In the Museum of Childhood"
May 7, 2025
"Who would not, given acreage in another's mind, lie there for awhile to watch the sky be sky" "the sky filled with stars that had been there already" Ohhhhhhh yeahhhhh
August 5, 2025
Some really decent poems in here, and some that just did not quite hit the mark for me.
April 19, 2025
Absolutely loved reading this collection!
February 6, 2023
This collection is a gift. It's been a while since I've read a body of work that left me feeling so seen, so well-known, and still so grateful to be a mystery at the same time.
Reading Wound Is The Origin of Wonder I felt these poems like a candid, intimate walk with the speaker. This walk is one comfortable with silence, rich with questions and curiosity, just as free to be without answers, but grateful for all that is found along the way.
These poems are not afraid to wander into the maybe's of life, into longing and melancholy, and above all else, it is not afraid to be without words, and therefore so full of meaning. It does not shy away from that precise, unique, way of loving both exclusive to the speaker, but also so deeply universal.
Reading Wound Is The Origin of Wonder I felt these poems like a candid, intimate walk with the speaker. This walk is one comfortable with silence, rich with questions and curiosity, just as free to be without answers, but grateful for all that is found along the way.
These poems are not afraid to wander into the maybe's of life, into longing and melancholy, and above all else, it is not afraid to be without words, and therefore so full of meaning. It does not shy away from that precise, unique, way of loving both exclusive to the speaker, but also so deeply universal.
November 28, 2022
After reading Popa’s prior collection, 2020’s ‘American Faith,’ and loving it, I was excited to dive into this collection, and I was not disappointed at all. Popa’s writing style, combined with a strong sense of place and purpose within all of her poems, made the reading experience enjoyable, and I found myself dwelling on many of the themes and sentiments expressed within the collection for days afterwards.
Popa’s poems run the gamut—they include darker subjects and themes, such as musings on grief, despair, and a loss of innocence, while also touching on many lighter and optimistic human experiences, including how to survive during a global pandemic and treasuring your past while also understanding that you have to let it go to have a successful and fruitful future. And that’s what I loved about this collection the most—Popa’s poems always varied from one page to the next, and we were never stuck in a morass of darkness for more than a few pages, and even that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. When I encountered poems that talked about the death of loved ones or the loss of youth, the sentiments and lessons expressed were drenched in hope as well, giving one the idea that you can dwell on memories and grief and the sense of loss, but you have to pick yourself up at the end of the day and keep living your life regardless, and that’s what makes the human condition so unique. We can feel the full range of emotions, from anger and sadness to ecstasy and happiness, but a successful life is measured in how we respond to adversity, whether that be professional or personal.
I loved the subjects and settings of many of these poems as well, especially her winter-related poems. There are several of these sprinkled throughout the various sections of the collection, and they usually add an emotional depth to the overall book (her descriptions of looking out a window and seeing a world covered in snow and darkness are haunting) that some poets seem to miss—they try so hard to sound lofty and ‘literary’ that they don’t realize that readers understand exactly what they’re trying to do, and the poems suffer because they sound so stuffy and ‘lofty.’ Popa’s poems are written in mostly plain prose, and she uses beautiful descriptive lines to fully immerse her readers in the world of each individual poem, which allowed me to leave the room I was reading them in and seeing the settings that the poems took place in. That, to me at least, is what makes great poetry—if you’re able to transport your readers to another time or place or season or world, that means a direct connection between author and reader has been forged, and you’ve most likely discovered a poet that you’ll follow for life.
I also appreciated that this collection included poems that directly referenced COVID and the lockdowns that occurred in 2020—I’ve read too many interviews with other poets and prose authors who say they will refuse to write about anything related to the pandemic for one reason or another, but I find that a little ridiculous, as the pandemic created seismic shifts in the world socially, politically, economically, and culturally. Popa writes about both the pandemic at large and her specific experiences in lockdown with honesty and openness, and she does so in a way that seems eminently relatable.
This is a terrific collection, and it is highly readable to even the most casual poetry reader. I look forward to what Popa continues to put out in the future, and her easy-to-read-and-understand style of writing places her in a group of poets that should see some real-world impact related to her work.
Thanks to NetGalley, W. W. Norton & Company, and Maya C. Popa for the digital ARC of 'Wound is the Origin of Wonder' in exchange for an honest review.
Popa’s poems run the gamut—they include darker subjects and themes, such as musings on grief, despair, and a loss of innocence, while also touching on many lighter and optimistic human experiences, including how to survive during a global pandemic and treasuring your past while also understanding that you have to let it go to have a successful and fruitful future. And that’s what I loved about this collection the most—Popa’s poems always varied from one page to the next, and we were never stuck in a morass of darkness for more than a few pages, and even that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. When I encountered poems that talked about the death of loved ones or the loss of youth, the sentiments and lessons expressed were drenched in hope as well, giving one the idea that you can dwell on memories and grief and the sense of loss, but you have to pick yourself up at the end of the day and keep living your life regardless, and that’s what makes the human condition so unique. We can feel the full range of emotions, from anger and sadness to ecstasy and happiness, but a successful life is measured in how we respond to adversity, whether that be professional or personal.
I loved the subjects and settings of many of these poems as well, especially her winter-related poems. There are several of these sprinkled throughout the various sections of the collection, and they usually add an emotional depth to the overall book (her descriptions of looking out a window and seeing a world covered in snow and darkness are haunting) that some poets seem to miss—they try so hard to sound lofty and ‘literary’ that they don’t realize that readers understand exactly what they’re trying to do, and the poems suffer because they sound so stuffy and ‘lofty.’ Popa’s poems are written in mostly plain prose, and she uses beautiful descriptive lines to fully immerse her readers in the world of each individual poem, which allowed me to leave the room I was reading them in and seeing the settings that the poems took place in. That, to me at least, is what makes great poetry—if you’re able to transport your readers to another time or place or season or world, that means a direct connection between author and reader has been forged, and you’ve most likely discovered a poet that you’ll follow for life.
I also appreciated that this collection included poems that directly referenced COVID and the lockdowns that occurred in 2020—I’ve read too many interviews with other poets and prose authors who say they will refuse to write about anything related to the pandemic for one reason or another, but I find that a little ridiculous, as the pandemic created seismic shifts in the world socially, politically, economically, and culturally. Popa writes about both the pandemic at large and her specific experiences in lockdown with honesty and openness, and she does so in a way that seems eminently relatable.
This is a terrific collection, and it is highly readable to even the most casual poetry reader. I look forward to what Popa continues to put out in the future, and her easy-to-read-and-understand style of writing places her in a group of poets that should see some real-world impact related to her work.
Thanks to NetGalley, W. W. Norton & Company, and Maya C. Popa for the digital ARC of 'Wound is the Origin of Wonder' in exchange for an honest review.
July 22, 2023
Wonder, from the Old English wundor, is thought to be a cognate with the German wunde or wound.
The past is a country of held breaths misread as silence, or the way things had to be. But I am trying to see what the land means instead of what the mind means in the relaying. Somewhere inside me is the understanding that water isn’t actually blue. What it aspires to, then, may be what I mean.
A blending of Jane Hirshfield and Mary Oliver, with a voice from the North Sea, these poems at first fell flat, they felt like a Eurocentric misreading of nature, the “sky filled with stars that had been there already,” “I’ll lose you one day, have lost you always, a long ongoing Westwardness of thought.” But on a closer, slower read, I found the beauty and lesson.
PRAYER
…
Those evenings I was sure I’d die,
you were teaching me to live; I see that now.
And the gravity of all you did not say
but left me like a map for the intuiting.
Slowly, I saw the world for what it was,
or was it I who grew familiar, that long habit of me?
FIFE
The white sun has her way here,
raising a fog like an atomized star
over ruins
and the heron standing on one leg.
Listen: everything is listening
to the North Sea retreating
like a voice before sleep…
When will the fog lift,
By what doing?
A faint hiss like a stone’s lament.
A faint hiss- that
Is your own life now, hurrying
From one light into another.
DEAR LIFE
I can’t undo all I have done to myself,
what I have let an appetite for love do to me.
I have wanted all the world, its beauties
and its injuries; some days,
I think that is punishment enough.
Often, I received more than I’d asked,
which is how this works—you fish in open water
ready to be wounded on what you reel in…
Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly.
Would you loosen the line—you’ll listen
if I ask you,
if you are the sort of life I think you are.
WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER
…
What would you do with the knowledge that I’d grieve for a bee? Someone like me could be played by the threat of endings. I’ll lose you one day, have lost you always, a long ongoing Westwardness of thought. It’s not metaphor that bees make honey of themselves while language only dreams the hunted thing. Let’s be hungry a little while longer. Let’s not hurt each other if we can.
THE PRESENT SPEAKS OF PAST PAIN
It’s that hour of dusk
when the sky is awash
in waning light, when, if we might
forgive each other,
this would be the hour for it.
I lay down beneath a yellow tree.
I understood I could hold on to the past or be happy.
Then, nothing. You did not appear to me.
The sky filled with stars
that had been there already.
THE TEARS OF THINGS
In a restaurant with mandolins affixed
to the ceiling, which you remembered
visiting at intervals of childhood,
the drive from Stroud into London’s
bright heaving with a hunger more than an aptitude for hope,
…
All night, I listened for my cause
in words blue-shifted under longing’s reach
until slow aerated rain began at last,
and we set out in the shadow of an
unnamed thing. We saw, in an absent-
minded wish, a loose stitch, the mind
in the velvet of the matter. No—
it was the sort of seeing that unfastens
the lacrimae rerum, tears of things.
We drowned, not knowing we stood in water.
EVERYONE IS HAVING AN ISLAND VACATION
Somewhere in Greece by the white of it,
blues so soaked they emit their own light.
Admiring coastlines from lookouts on cliffs,
looking blasé in ancient temples.
I remember those summers on my father’s shoulders
when the man would point to the cross
on the mountain, ask if it was raining.
Full days settled by wildflower and stone.
Green, in a word; we gave each day the full human,
and it gave us tranquil deaths: the beetle’s gem-like shell,
vacant bee in the window of an ancient tram.
I was unsure anyone lived the way I did, slowly, presently, in color.
THE SCORES
The stones are alive here, clotted with mollusks,
bearded and slick with sea grass.
All night, I watched the blue adjust,
slow exhale at light’s command.
The shoreline and its principle of hunger
foregone that something else might overtake.
It isn’t like the love we know that brings us flowers.
It’s the love whose imminence
is certain blinding, the split shell that draws blood.
Of course, the tragedy would be to want
nothing with want, to gaze at the North Sea
and see only a futility. How then to look
so that the light’s hand might move you
like water, returning to the same conclusion,
hauling its mind back to the harbor,
tolling a bell that won’t let.
AFTER A VASE BROKEN BY MARCEL PROUST
…Like August stars, we offer
temporary light, our lives measured
in latitudes of loss, the longest distance
between any two points in time.
And, errant, we are covetous: the humble
vase broken by Marcel Proust re-glued,
imbued with preciousness. He believed
that grief develops the mind. What is
the mind if not that surface upon which
the world can be endlessly rebroken?
THERE MUST BE A MEANING
…
The past is a country of held breaths
misread as silence, or the way things
had to be. But I am trying to see
what the land means instead
of what the mind means in the relaying.
Somewhere inside me is the understanding
that water isn’t actually blue. What it
aspires to, then, may be what I mean.
YEAR
I wouldn’t be who I am
if I could bear the foliage,
the hour losing
its precious light
like a knight bleeding out
through a hole in the armor.
I wouldn’t be, if I could,
any more than that—
light on burnt leaves
while the hurt worked
its anchor, the chain eased
slowly like a tongue,
a word for grief that
doesn’t rhyme with thief.
Any day now, autumn.
Winter any day.
LETTERS IN WINTER
…
At the café, a woman describes lilacs
in her garden. She is speaking of spring,
the life after this one. The first thing
to go when I shut the book between us
is the book; silence, its own alphabet,
and still something so dear about it.
It will be spring, I say over and over.
I’ll ask that what I lost not grow back.
I see how winter is forbidding:
it grows the heart by lessening everything else
and demands that we keep trying.
I am trying. But oh, to understand us,
any one of us, and not to grieve?
SPRING
The park announces the season over and over to no one, and the silence cranes to listen. Terraces of light now that the day is longer. When joy comes, will I be ready, I wonder.
THE PEACOCKS
in Holland Park don’t care who loves them.
They are like stones at the bottom of cool rivers
and it’s only our wandering that brings them
into focus, its own kind of foreboding.
It’s not only color and scale that endears them.
It’s the way they cannot be conceived of fully
without blinking back a dread at splendor
so near a public waste bin, the likelihood of failure.
The staccato of orange against blue—really,
how much more will this world enrage us
with its beauty, even as it leans towards last
assessments. And haven’t I minded you like this,
a cartographer patiently charting planets
before going mad with light? Haven’t I taken
that footpath down a woodland labeled dark;
do not enter; idle; want? Oh, but for the ode of it.
The life that can’t be lived behind the eyelids.
And you, a fruit there somewhere in the branches.
A bird that will not scare or fly.
The past is a country of held breaths misread as silence, or the way things had to be. But I am trying to see what the land means instead of what the mind means in the relaying. Somewhere inside me is the understanding that water isn’t actually blue. What it aspires to, then, may be what I mean.
A blending of Jane Hirshfield and Mary Oliver, with a voice from the North Sea, these poems at first fell flat, they felt like a Eurocentric misreading of nature, the “sky filled with stars that had been there already,” “I’ll lose you one day, have lost you always, a long ongoing Westwardness of thought.” But on a closer, slower read, I found the beauty and lesson.
PRAYER
…
Those evenings I was sure I’d die,
you were teaching me to live; I see that now.
And the gravity of all you did not say
but left me like a map for the intuiting.
Slowly, I saw the world for what it was,
or was it I who grew familiar, that long habit of me?
FIFE
The white sun has her way here,
raising a fog like an atomized star
over ruins
and the heron standing on one leg.
Listen: everything is listening
to the North Sea retreating
like a voice before sleep…
When will the fog lift,
By what doing?
A faint hiss like a stone’s lament.
A faint hiss- that
Is your own life now, hurrying
From one light into another.
DEAR LIFE
I can’t undo all I have done to myself,
what I have let an appetite for love do to me.
I have wanted all the world, its beauties
and its injuries; some days,
I think that is punishment enough.
Often, I received more than I’d asked,
which is how this works—you fish in open water
ready to be wounded on what you reel in…
Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly.
Would you loosen the line—you’ll listen
if I ask you,
if you are the sort of life I think you are.
WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER
…
What would you do with the knowledge that I’d grieve for a bee? Someone like me could be played by the threat of endings. I’ll lose you one day, have lost you always, a long ongoing Westwardness of thought. It’s not metaphor that bees make honey of themselves while language only dreams the hunted thing. Let’s be hungry a little while longer. Let’s not hurt each other if we can.
THE PRESENT SPEAKS OF PAST PAIN
It’s that hour of dusk
when the sky is awash
in waning light, when, if we might
forgive each other,
this would be the hour for it.
I lay down beneath a yellow tree.
I understood I could hold on to the past or be happy.
Then, nothing. You did not appear to me.
The sky filled with stars
that had been there already.
THE TEARS OF THINGS
In a restaurant with mandolins affixed
to the ceiling, which you remembered
visiting at intervals of childhood,
the drive from Stroud into London’s
bright heaving with a hunger more than an aptitude for hope,
…
All night, I listened for my cause
in words blue-shifted under longing’s reach
until slow aerated rain began at last,
and we set out in the shadow of an
unnamed thing. We saw, in an absent-
minded wish, a loose stitch, the mind
in the velvet of the matter. No—
it was the sort of seeing that unfastens
the lacrimae rerum, tears of things.
We drowned, not knowing we stood in water.
EVERYONE IS HAVING AN ISLAND VACATION
Somewhere in Greece by the white of it,
blues so soaked they emit their own light.
Admiring coastlines from lookouts on cliffs,
looking blasé in ancient temples.
I remember those summers on my father’s shoulders
when the man would point to the cross
on the mountain, ask if it was raining.
Full days settled by wildflower and stone.
Green, in a word; we gave each day the full human,
and it gave us tranquil deaths: the beetle’s gem-like shell,
vacant bee in the window of an ancient tram.
I was unsure anyone lived the way I did, slowly, presently, in color.
THE SCORES
The stones are alive here, clotted with mollusks,
bearded and slick with sea grass.
All night, I watched the blue adjust,
slow exhale at light’s command.
The shoreline and its principle of hunger
foregone that something else might overtake.
It isn’t like the love we know that brings us flowers.
It’s the love whose imminence
is certain blinding, the split shell that draws blood.
Of course, the tragedy would be to want
nothing with want, to gaze at the North Sea
and see only a futility. How then to look
so that the light’s hand might move you
like water, returning to the same conclusion,
hauling its mind back to the harbor,
tolling a bell that won’t let.
AFTER A VASE BROKEN BY MARCEL PROUST
…Like August stars, we offer
temporary light, our lives measured
in latitudes of loss, the longest distance
between any two points in time.
And, errant, we are covetous: the humble
vase broken by Marcel Proust re-glued,
imbued with preciousness. He believed
that grief develops the mind. What is
the mind if not that surface upon which
the world can be endlessly rebroken?
THERE MUST BE A MEANING
…
The past is a country of held breaths
misread as silence, or the way things
had to be. But I am trying to see
what the land means instead
of what the mind means in the relaying.
Somewhere inside me is the understanding
that water isn’t actually blue. What it
aspires to, then, may be what I mean.
YEAR
I wouldn’t be who I am
if I could bear the foliage,
the hour losing
its precious light
like a knight bleeding out
through a hole in the armor.
I wouldn’t be, if I could,
any more than that—
light on burnt leaves
while the hurt worked
its anchor, the chain eased
slowly like a tongue,
a word for grief that
doesn’t rhyme with thief.
Any day now, autumn.
Winter any day.
LETTERS IN WINTER
…
At the café, a woman describes lilacs
in her garden. She is speaking of spring,
the life after this one. The first thing
to go when I shut the book between us
is the book; silence, its own alphabet,
and still something so dear about it.
It will be spring, I say over and over.
I’ll ask that what I lost not grow back.
I see how winter is forbidding:
it grows the heart by lessening everything else
and demands that we keep trying.
I am trying. But oh, to understand us,
any one of us, and not to grieve?
SPRING
The park announces the season over and over to no one, and the silence cranes to listen. Terraces of light now that the day is longer. When joy comes, will I be ready, I wonder.
THE PEACOCKS
in Holland Park don’t care who loves them.
They are like stones at the bottom of cool rivers
and it’s only our wandering that brings them
into focus, its own kind of foreboding.
It’s not only color and scale that endears them.
It’s the way they cannot be conceived of fully
without blinking back a dread at splendor
so near a public waste bin, the likelihood of failure.
The staccato of orange against blue—really,
how much more will this world enrage us
with its beauty, even as it leans towards last
assessments. And haven’t I minded you like this,
a cartographer patiently charting planets
before going mad with light? Haven’t I taken
that footpath down a woodland labeled dark;
do not enter; idle; want? Oh, but for the ode of it.
The life that can’t be lived behind the eyelids.
And you, a fruit there somewhere in the branches.
A bird that will not scare or fly.
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