Fuad, Tracy: PORTAL

University of Chicago Press, paperback

Publication Date: February 19, 2024

Publisher Marketing: "Tracy Fuad's second collection of poems, PORTAL, documents a life in which even the most intimate experiences are mediated by the flattening interface of technology and a world in which language is no longer produced solely by humans but by artificial intelligences as well. The poems circle the topics of replication, reproduction, and inheritance, and the way these processes are born out in language, history, and biology. In these poems, a baby is born; the world shrinks into tiny pockets under the new logic of contagion; two people are wed; the roses which washed up ashore centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. All of this is set against a backdrop of ecological ruin, of decimated chestnut trees and a beached baby whale. The collection mirrors the restless spirit of the present, shifting between voices and forms. At times the poems take the form of experimental essays, and elsewhere the sonnet is reimagined and reinvented as a disembodied voice from the distant future. A portal can be a way out or a way in-or a website at the center of many networked websites. These poems take delight in the strangeness of contemporary life, even as they grieve something intangible which has been lost"--