Yes, at first you’ll be unseeing.
For half a year, you’ll know only my body’s single taste.
Then you’ll encounter the world.
The world will flood in.
And the world will keep flooding in.
From “Worm”
Portal, winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Prize, is a profound treatment of origins perfectly befitting Tracy Fuad’s award-winning debut, About: Blank. In her second full-length collection, Fuad features sweeping lines and a liberal use of white space, a structure that highlights the author’s balance of patient, accessible language with deeply philosophical observations about the nature of beginnings. At the center of the collection, readers encounter a speaker working to process the impending birth of her child against a dying planet, a conflict that echoes throughout every poem.
Fuad opens the collection with “Song,” a poem that is simultaneously almost seven pages long and which features lines that average just five or six syllables per line. The juxtaposition offers a perfect balance, carrying readers through a stream of consciousness that considers everything from the difference between snails and slugs to the origins of the technology that allows the speaker to monitor her baby in a dark room. Fuad beautifully moves from the “young and doomed” slugs she flung over the fence to “Logging on [her] fake account / To watch the stories / Of a lover” to climbing into a bathtub so small she must “curl up fetally / To fit in it.” The speaker describes how she would feel:
…the dome of flesh
[she] had become
Trying to find the hard sphere
Of the baby’s head
in an image that highlights Fuad’s ability to create extraordinarily tender and vivid images without descending into unnecessarily ornate or complicated language. The speaker’s final realization echoes the author’s penchant for short, direct language to contain a statement that is otherwise deeply philosophical and complex.
The realization is grounded in an exploration of semantics and language, a theme that appears often throughout Portal. In “Song,” the speaker explains how she could watch the baby while she enjoyed a cocktail down the street, an act
Which I deemed a needed if symbolic
Return to what I called
My life
The possessive my
Essential to the notion
That the sum of what I saw and felt
Belonged to me—
only for her to realize, in the final lines of the poem, “That all of this / Was mine / Although it wasn’t.” This understanding is integral to Portal, which extends the question of possession to our treatment of the planet itself. In “The Third Space,” for example, the speaker offers a similar critique of possession as she first consumes “the little book” from which she is reading, explaining that “If you take the words away / What you have left is a tree. / Now I will take out / The words.” Fuad effectively bridges pregnancy and writing through the shared act of creation and embodiment, then turns the question of possession back on each as she relinquishes feelings of ownership over both child and planet.
“One Thousand Nights” again features an insomniac stream of consciousness, though this time Fuad leans into sprawling lines and meandering thoughts. Again, readers encounter significant white space, as every stanza is composed of a single line. Despite the visual gaps between ideas, there is a clear line of thought that draws images of “a city in weather” and “the small sound a person’s body makes in the moment just before they speak” together with “a lover who described the careful early touches as belong to epistemology” and “This unuprootable habit of ending with or, a softening at the end of every sentence / Or, every sentence made exchangeable.” The poem crescendos toward the exoticization of language, specifically the word “sesame” and its origins, again linking the various traumas and joys of the poem to conscious and unconscious beginnings.
Portal often breaks free from familiar poetic forms, but the collection is not devoid of short, tightly woven pieces with distinct lyricism and familiar shape. “Birth” contains four tercets, each with lines that are fairly balanced in length. The poem returns to the titular image in the second stanza, as the speaker describes her child being born “beneath six beaming spotlights. / Born of a sharpness, and set to music. / In the backroom, on a tablet, through a portal.” The image evokes memories of birth during the height of the pandemic, when all but the mother were forced to witness through tablets. “mortar, pestle,” the second section of the collection, also features poems with more conventional shape. This section contains a ten poem series centered on the concept of planetary boundaries. Though the framework describes nine boundaries, Fuad includes “The Tenth Planetary Boundary,” a poem which considers the dissolution of the body, technology, and even “A scarcity / of future” before culminating in the assertion, “I was there. There I was.” Given Fuad’s attention to semantics, the use of the past tense is haunting as it cements to absence of both a present and a future, an existence situated firmly in the “was.”
Portal is remarkably accessible and relatable, yet Fuad’s penchant for the philosophical and teleological ensures that readers come away deeply affected. These are poems that will linger in the mind for days at a time, poems that will fundamentally alter your perception of beginnings (and endings).