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Maya C Popa "Wound is the Origin of Wonder" in conversation with L.J. Sysko
Maya C Popa will be in conversation with L.J. Syskoto discuss her new book, Wound is the Origin of Wonder!
About the Book:
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, Wound is the Origin of Wonder 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.
About the Author:
Maya C. Popa is the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton/Picador) named one of the Guardian’s best recent books of poetry, and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and winner of the North American Book Prize. Her poems and essays appear in The Atlantic, the Nation, Poetry, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, and was previously a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford University, where she received her MA. The Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly, she teaches advanced poetry at NYU and runs Conscious Writers Collective, an online writing community for rigorous and supportive writing mentorship for those seeking guidance beyond the scope of traditional degrees.
About the Conversation Partner:
L.J. Sysko, author of Daughter of Man, to join me on the 17th. L.J.'s collection was selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series (University of Arkansas Press, 2023). The book is a “a clinic in irony” (Ross Gay); “this whip-smart collection is a playful celebration of feminine power” (Publishers Weekly) and, according to The Colorado Review, Sysko is “a valley girl Beowulf.”