Wound Is the Origin of Wonder: Poems (ePub)

“This book is an astonishment. In ravishing, formally exploratory poems, Maya C. Popa wields the lyric like a reparative scalpel, evoking wonder and woundedness in equal measure: 'It's plain we didn't see / the future coming,' she announces. Searching for a spring that brings renewal, lamenting 'snow / that vanishes with touch,' her poems register a unique combination of imperilment and possibility, with imagistic precision one can't forget: 'A faint hiss—that is / your own life now, hurrying / from one light to another.' Wound Is the Origin of Wonder reflects to us our own historical moment with unusual clarity, even as its lyric exploration of psychic and social landscapes stand outside of time. This is a book I will return to.” —Meghan O'Rourke

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.