JALUBI
In what ways does lineage resemble language, and are there aspects of both which will always feel untranslatable? With Prague as a backdrop, Jalubí explores this question as it attempts to balance on the fraught fulcrum point of what in the speaker’s family history has been accurately preserved and what has been turned into myth by way of intentional and accidental misrepresentations. Set in the shadow of witches, dragons, and a great-grandmother’s ghost, this collection suggests history itself is a haunting.
Like a persistent spirit, history refuses to cast itself in the sepia-toned filter of nostalgia: it’s instead the gold leaf which gilds theaters in Prague; the glinting burgundy of the city’s garnets fashioned into heirloom earrings; the gray of castles and cathedrals; canola fields fawn and flaxen in a small farming village near the Slovakian border. Amidst the colors and customs of Prague, the speaker shares the struggle of trying to understand and be understood across languages. Translation in these poems is both play and performance, invitation and isolation.
Framed in sections which mark various arrivals and departures, the collection posits whether a person can ever truly inhabit a place with any degree of fixedness or whether one’s identity must always remain in flux. Through these arrivals and departures, Jalubí chronicles the search for a family’s small farming village of origin and ultimately becomes a search for the self. As the speaker writes in the collection’s closing lines, “Being one person in this lineage is no more/than being one letter of a language:/written yet unaware of words.”
Hypochondria, Least Powerful of the greek Gods
“In this engaging and moving collection, Emily Paige Wilson mythologizes the thinking, feeling, and embodied self, balancing myth-making with lucid and lyric first-person utterances in which the speaker unfolds what ails her: anxiety, cysts, infections, aches. These poems — as wise as they are searching, as tender as they are fierce — come in a dazzling variety of forms and voices, offering us many angles on their subject, which is, ultimately, the pain of inhabiting a body and mind that feel things acutely and relentlessly. With the empath’s capacity to experience others’ suffering as intimately as her own, Wilson gives the lie to the notion that hypochondria arises from obsessive self-focus, revealing a set of harder but perhaps more hopeful truths. First, compassion is a lonely business if not reciprocated. Second, true empathy makes distinctions between my flesh and yours, my fate and yours, moot. In the end, the book’s question might be this: how can we live less fearfully, more joyfully in ailing, aging, vulnerable, desiring bodies? And the answer might be together.”
I’ll BUILD US A HOME
“Emily Paige Wilson captures the way that love is always searching for an impossible language, inventing homes of “banded amethyst, basil, and bird cages” inside the mind of the lover. These brilliant devotional poems are incantations, spells, and prayers made manifest. Wilson’s dexterity with language and sound builds a tiny house within each line, giving form to longing’s jittery feelings, while at the same time creating something beautiful and new. They are fierce, political, intimate, playful, and heartbreakingly honest poems. Who stands as witness inside the house of new love? “Sometimes I foolishly still think we are the only ones,” she writes. And in this way, she has written a book for everyone.”