Description
Book SynopsisA poetry collection that brings together word, image, and sound toreflect on fractured, fragmentary states of being. The poetry of Mandible Wishbone Solvent is situated in the space of bridges, fragmentary overlays, spectral reach, and the desire to keep reaching. Asiya Wadud's poems engage in this act, not to stake a claim or to fasten themselves, but to hold fragments together in order to offer possibilities for connection and extension. Throughout the collection lies an acknowledgment that any hold will drift, meander, and find new paths, with each separation making space for new entanglements. Drawing on a keen interest in tactility and ekphrasis, Wadud mines the repetition and extension that comes with any fractured state of existence and considers the nature of a residual and roving we. Following this selection of lyrical, ekphrastic, fragmented poems, the book concludes with two prose pieces that dwell on the concepts of isthmus and drift, respectively, which offer further
Trade Review"Wadud is an astute interpreter of the world as a text. She shows us how the physical space rendered (un)available to those fleeing disaster is akin to the conceptual breadth lacking in our minds: 'If we cannot imagine a destitute journey, one born in an urgency that forces someone to voyage across borders, then it is in that moment that it is possible to empty water from jugs, again and again.' Wadud asks readers to match her connective brilliance by turning toward the world with a discerning eye, daring us to expand our minds and behold complexity. Her poems refuse to surrender to a reading that is easily impressed with her syntactic mosaic." * Harriet Books *
“Wadud’s astounding new poems—many of them ekphrastic, all of them rigorously intricate, supersaturated—come across to me as both hard-edged and liminal. Enacting the dynamic relationship between figure and ground, center and edge, they frame the constant unfolding of meaning’s dimensions, its reverberations.” -- Mónica de la Torre, author of "Repetition Nineteen"
“Composed of lyric poems, artwork, and prose,
Mandible Wishbone Solvent distinguishes itself in both form and inquiry from much of the poetry currently published in the US. Wadud’s aesthetic, in which the lyric permutates, shifts, and merges with what flows through, is ethically aligned, as the prose makes clear, with shifting natural (rather than unyielding geopolitical) borders and with those who are ejected and must drift from place to place. Gorgeous, meditative, and spiritual, this immersive collection offers a terrain of lush language that seems precarious and vulnerable but is ultimately ungovernable, by border patrol or otherwise. ‘How can we become capacious in our rendering of the journey itself?’ Wadud asks. And this book is an example, with every gesture, of that elasticity and generosity.” -- Rosa Alcalá, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "MyOther Tongue"
Table of ContentsPart 1: Other ovals all along
#221 ½
poised in hover hours
seven desire lines one map
disclose concentric centers
the herring arrive as overture
all excess bloomed then felled
and green waters and green
be a bridge over something
1.2
Part 2: Scant excess enclosed in a film
Mandible Wishbone Solvent
Shorn, treaded, red
a symmetrical open plane, curve
In the checkpoint I was all arms / all face
the disc takes shape, dear cutlass
Part 3: Microplane weights / accounts of first contact
cobalt mirror image 1
cobalt mirror image 2
cobalt mirror image 3
cobalt mirror image 4
cobalt mirror image 5
cobalt mirror image 6
my mind makes for me a window then a door
Part 4: The shroud can encase whatever we tell it
Nearly Any Two Things Can Cohere
Acknowledgments
Drift: Against proximal distance from the center
