PORTAL

Reviews / Votes

"Fuad's long lines and monostich stanzas resonate and linger, like an intercity express train in the speaker's new country of residence. From a dazzling array of poetic techniques, Fuad's use of repetition to fashion pitch-perfect lyrics stands out, from tiny syllabic songs-'the inking of a ginkgo leaf'-to complex, emotionally freighted refrains, 'my mother's mother's remains remain at the morgue.' . . . For Fuad, language is a stubborn, tangible thing that bruises the body and, as the speaker says, created a 'swollen spot on the roof of my mouth where it met my teeth.' . . . Fuad's captivating poetry is totally her own." * Booklist starred review * "'I generated faces of people that didn't exist,' Fuad writes, 'and found that I already loved them.' The one beloved person that the speaker generates, like the wormlike figure of a sonogram, is her soon-to-be-born baby, and the 'portal' of the title is both birth itself and the liminal spaces where true meaning is born: in the roots of words ('Worm, from the hypothetical root wer-, to turn, to bend'), in the accidental things of this world (the roses of Cape Cod arriving from a shipwreck), in the linguistic otherness of an Anglophone visitor to Berlin, and in the existential doubt that one must undergo ('the seeds of a nihilism with which I was once well acquainted') to attain sense and value." * LitHub, on "New Poetry Books to Read in February" * "In these precise, measured poems, Fuad brushes up against the (imagined, imposed) limitations of a life that is lived, and observed, and exhausted-and a conduit for more life still. . . . Evocative and probing, Portal is a collection I will return to for its music and wisdom." * Electric Lit * "[Fuad's] poems carry you along with plainspoken language and description that at times can almost feel dissociative, a little distant. Then a sharp observation, an unearthing of layers, an unexpected swerve into humor. A subtle buildup into something moving. In the backdrop of PORTAL is the pandemic, pregnancy and the coming of parenthood, the looming ecological crisis, an artist residency. In the foreground is the feeling of being new to a place, and all the observational acuity it affords you-that different kind of attention, and what it makes clear. . . . Ultimately, as [Fuad] notes, PORTAL is a book about the things we inherit-memory, language, culture-and how being in a new place can cast these things into a different relief." * Los Angeles Review of Books * "The sophomore volume from Fuad examines the complicated experience of parenthood in a world shadowed by climate anxiety and postcolonial tradition. These pieces wrestle with technology, etymology, language, and biology." * Publishers Weekly * Included in the list of "Best New Poetry for Spring" 2024 * Little Infinite * Named one of their "Favorite Poetry Collections of the Year" for 2024 * Literary Hub * "PORTAL is remarkably accessible and relatable, yet Fuad's penchant for the philosophical and teleological ensures that readers come away deeply affected. These are poems that will linger in the mind for days at a time, poems that will fundamentally alter your perception of beginnings (and endings)." * The Poetry Question * "The gene-editing technology CRISPR works by looking for palindromes in genetic code, snipping the line just there, and splicing in new material. I thought of this while reading Fuad's PORTAL-how sound and thought and poetry arrive, split us open, and go off somewhere else, and we are the point of that snip, that splice, that split, rather than anything's origin. But who is doing the snipping-the fates, the gods, the rich? The sheer, mercurial stuff of PORTAL will synch you to its thinking til you wake with your locks in the sink and the shears in your hand." -- Joyelle McSweeney, author of "Toxicon and Arachne" "PORTAL leads you into a world of objects, songs, slugs, whole days-whose etched precision is haunted by an enormity of hyper- and hypo-sensitized consciousness, of Being, dare I say of Soul-of restless Soul. It is a hot summer. Everyone is being watched. The speaker herself is creeping on the Instagram of her ex. A baby is born. Language itself weighs elegiacally upon a voice whose grammar feels like exile. This is a book of possession and dispossession. A world watching itself dissolve, a heart beating behind the world: wildly awake, and lit by shocking sunlight." -- Ariana Reines, author of "A Sand Book" "'I had been trained my whole life for this wanting,' writes Fuad in this astonishing collection. PORTAL maps the folds and membranes, the sentient recursive topographies of an extraordinary poetic consciousness. A sequence of thought unfolds - line by line - each step bridging voids of reference: the economic, the linguistic, the sensual. We are guided through a dimensional journey over thresholds we were unable to perceive until guided by this poet's vision." -- Monica Youn, author of "From From" "One might call PORTAL the present dread of future shock. Fuad's is a poetry of taut vibration, of quaver or vibrato culminating in a crescendo of unsettled feeling. Powerfully arranging the personal and the public, the poet has set a collection of arguments and dreads, hopes and curiosities that work at micro, meso, and macro levels . . . of anxious bodies at risk and the land as a site of antagonism/estrangement. Fuad seems tonally skeptical that regeneration will save us, in a here and now where and when blight upon arrival and reproduction is 'the point of a screw.' (F)utilitarian. Still, PORTAL plays out Fuad's desire for a child even as she anticipates imminent dispossession. It's these tightly composed conflicts that make for a dynamic and bracing read of love as accompaniment to dislocation and alienation." -- Douglas Kearney, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of Optic Subwoof