Wound Is the Origin of Wonder by Maya C. Popa

Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection.

Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what’s by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin?

Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers―John Milton’s visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust―to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past.

Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.

Maya C. Popa is a naturally gifted poet, lucidly engaged with the most profound questions we face in our collective responsibilities and our relations with each other. She writes with love and wonder of a world poised at a perilous moment: “My children, will they exist by the time / it’s irreversible?” she asks. “Will they live / astonished at the thought of ice / not pulled from the mouth of a machine?”

To read her poems is to pause again and again at the precision of imagery, breadth of ideas, and the warmth and generousness of her lyric voice.

Maya C. Popa is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at New York University.

Wound Is the Origin of Wonder: Poems
by Maya C. Popa (Author)
Publisher: ‎W. W. Norton & Company
November 8, 2022
Language: English
Hardcover: ‎96 pages
ISBN-10: ‎1324021365
ISBN-13: ‎978-1324021360
Hardcover $21.49
Paperback $15.99

• fleursdumal.nl magazine

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