University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021 Paper: 978-0-8229-6668-5 | eISBN: 978-0-8229-8859-5 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | AWARDS | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Gold Winner, 2022 Nautilus Book Award
In about:blank, Tracy Fuad builds a poetics of contemporary dissociation. Funny, plaintive, and cutting, this formally inventive debut probes alienation in place and in language through the author’s consideration of her own relationship to Iraqi Kurdistan. about:blank—the title of which is the universal URL for a blank web page—complicates questions of longing and belonging. Interrogating the language of internet chatrooms, Yelp reviews, and the Kurdish dictionary, the poems here leap surprisingly between subjects to find new meaning.
Written before and during the years the author spent living in Iraqi Kurdistan, the collection documents the alienation of being inside, outside, and between language(s) and the always-already terror of grammar. At once haunted and humorous, about:blank inhabits and exhibits the disorientation and fragmentation that is endemic to the internet era, and mourns the loss of a more embodied existence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Tracy Fuad is the author of PITH, winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Prize, and DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Best New Poets Anthology, the New Republic, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and a 2021–2022 Writing Fellow at the Providence Fine Arts Work Center.
REVIEWS
“For all her experimentation, Fuad is anchored to the complexities of her Iraqi Kurdish heritage, even as gentrification changes the region. . . . The submergence of identity richly complicates this poet’s promising debut.” —Booklist
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Half-Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Project
Iraq Vag Panic
Object Project
An Abridged History of Buttons
Report of the Excavation at Tell Sitak
Future Conditional
Future Project
Continuous Present
Causativity
Avalent Dummy Subject
Object Exercise
Considering the Unit of the Day
Every Day I Get Exciting Emails
Jin - Jiyan - Azade
King Bluetooth
Four and Three Quarter Stars
Dislocation
Lessons of Darkness
www.kurdchat.com
The Pith of Every Language is a Rift
Object
Shopping People Function
The Dream of Convenience
Objet
Eject: To be Read Aloud by a Robot
Subject
Fabric on Planet Earth
Slowly, I Learned to Pronounce the Language in the Language
Terms of Syllogism
A Color Named After A Fruit
Material Culture
Notes
Acknowledgments
AWARDS
Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, 2020
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