Proprioception is the body’s ability to perceive its own position in space. It answers the question where do I fit? This is the focus of Tracy Fuad’s latest poetry collection, which addresses Kurdish identity, migration, and place from an immigrant perspective.
Fuad use language translation and transliteration where they intersect with technology. For example, “My Uncle’s Kurdish Restaurant” and “Lessons of Darkness” are built out of Yelp and Google reviews of a Kurdish Restaurant, and sentences of an English grammar book for Kurdish speakers.
The word play in “Every Day I Get Exciting Emails” is striking. Fuad translated the title into languages using Google Translate, and then repeated the translations, but goes on to further reduce the sentence fragments to a single word:
day
day
day
dei
This spoke to me. Day-after-day, emails – I get it. And for the rest of the day, I wondered where God fit into all this technologyand war of scorched earth?
Fuad exposes the limitations of language to effectively describe war and displacement, to understand the horrors of the Halabjadead and Abu Ghraib prison. The result is a vivid description of a people and place, and a heartbreaking recounting of a history where the
… land is split by
roads where oil
hadn’t spilled
Purchase your copy of Pith from Newfound.