PORTAL by Tracy Fuad

PORTAL by Tracy Fuad

Tracy Fuad’s second collection of poems, PORTAL, probes the fraught experience of bringing a new life into a world that is both lush and filled with gloom. A baby is born in a brutalist building; the planet shrinks under the new logic of contagion; roses washed up from a shipwreck centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape.

PORTAL documents a life that is mediated, even at its most intimate moments, by flattening interfaces of technology and in which language—and even intelligence—is no longer produced only by humans.

The voices here are stalked by eco-grief and loneliness, but they also brim with song and ecstasy, reveling in the strangeness of contemporary life while grieving losses that cannot be restored. Through Fuad’s frank, honest poetry, PORTAL vibrates with pleasure and dread.

Being more “connected” than ever to the world, there can be a strange sensation in trying to determine where we end and where everything else beginsFuad is the poet of this porous feeling, and she follows the tides of that ever-changing boundary. With its inventive, precise language, PORTAL makes clarity from noise. ―Paris Review

The sophomore volume from Fuad examines the complicated experience of parenthood in a world shadowed by climate anxiety and postcolonial tradition. These pieces wrestle with technology, etymology, language, and biology. —Publisher’s Weekly

From a dazzling array of poetic techniques, Fuad's use of repetition to fashion pitch-perfect lyrics stands out, from tiny syllabic songs—'the inking of a ginkgo leaf'—to complex, emotionally freighted refrains, 'my mother’s mother’s remains remain at the morgue.' . . . For Fuad, language is a stubborn, tangible thing that bruises the body and, as the speaker says, created a 'swollen spot on the roof of my mouth where it met my teeth.'... Fuad's captivating poetry is totally her own. —Booklist starred review

Tracy Fuad is a poet and writer based in Berlin. Her second collection of poetry, PORTAL (University of Chicago Press, 2024; the87press, 2026), won the Phoenix Emerging Poets’ Prize. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Fuad’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Poetry Daily, and Poem-a-Day and have been translated into Kurdish, Turkish, German, and Spanish. She lives in Berlin, where she teaches poetry and directs the Berlin Writers’ Workshop. She is currently at work on a novel.