Tracy Fuad - "Portal"

Tracy Fuad will discuss Portal. She will be joined in conversation by Srikanth Reddy. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

Presented in partnership with UChicago Creative Writing

At the Logan Center for the Arts, Room 801

About the Book: 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.

Peeling back the surfaces of words to reveal their etymologies, Fuad embraces playfulness through her formal range, engaging styles from the tersely lineated to the essayistic as she intertwines topics of replication, reproduction, technology, language, history, and biology.

About the Author: Tracy Fuad is the author of about:blank, a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the winner of the Donald Hall Prize. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and the Berlin Senate Fund. She lives in Berlin, where she teaches at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.

About the Interlocutor: Srikanth Reddy is a poet, critic, and literary editor who teaches at the University of Chicago. His latest book of poetry, "Underworld Lit," was a finalist for the Griffin International Prize in Poetry, the Poetry Society of America's Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year for 2021. A former guest editor at Poetry magazine, he is currently the poetry editor of The Paris Review, and a co-editor for the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press.