Wound is the Origin of Wonder

(Paperback)

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I can't undo all I have done to myself, what I have let an appetite for love do to me. I have wanted all the world, its beauties and its injuries; some days, I think that is punishment enough. Wound is the Origin of Wonder introduces UK readers to the work of a rapidly rising star in American poetry. Maya C. Popa is a naturally gifted poet, lucidly engaged with the most profound questions we face in our collective responsibilities and our relations with each other. She writes with love and wonder of a world poised at a perilous moment: "My children, will they exist by the time / it's irreversible" she asks. "Will they live / astonished at the thought of ice / not pulled from the mouth of a machine" Popa takes seriously the poet's duty to pay attention, to seek what Seamus Heaney called "the images... adequate to our predicament". To read her poems is to pause again and again at the precision of imagery, breadth of ideas, and the warmth and generousness of her lyric voice.

Reviews

Whitman declared what I assume you shall assume and Popas audacious reply is to transcend deadlock and reveal beauty wherever her gently subversive lyric freely wanders, with phrases freshly minted in lines whose intensity is as impactful and affirmative as lived experience. -- Daljit Nagra
Beautiful, musical, imaginative and blink-back playful poems. A very original voice in real lyric conversation with the self, with the other, with life and the creaturely world. A joy of a book. -- Ruth Padel
Maya C. Popas new book is an astonishment. In ravishing, formally exploratory poems, Popa wields the lyric like a reparative scalpel, evoking wonder and woundedness in equal measure: Its plain we didnt 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

Author Bio

Maya Popa is a Romanian-American writer, journalist and academic, born in 1989. Her first published collection of poems was American Faith in 2019, which won the North American Book Prize. This is her second published collection. A former Oxford University Clarendon Scholar, her criticism has received awards from The Poetry Foundation (Chicago) and appears widely, including in the TLS, Poetry, the Poetry Review and the London Magazine. Her MA and PhD research focus was on how heightened states of attention, induced by crises of faith and by wonder respectively, spurred Romantic and Victorian poets to generate formally innovative works. She is currently completing her PhD at Goldsmiths, where she is the recipient of an English Department Bursary Award for outstanding merit. She teaches at NYU and elsewhere.