We’re honored to welcome Tracy Fuad, Daniel Borzutzky, and Jose-Luis Moctezuma to the store for a reading in celebration of Tracy’s new book PORTAL, a poetry collection exploring inheritance and reproduction through the lenses of parenthood, etymology, postcoloniality, and climate anxiety.

Tracy Fuad’s second collection of poems, PORTAL, probes the fraught experience of bringing a new life into a world that is both lush and filled with gloom. A baby is born in a brutalist building; the planet shrinks under the new logic of contagion; roses washed up from a shipwreck centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. PORTAL documents a life that is mediated, even at its most intimate moments, by flattening interfaces of technology and in which language—and even intelligence—is no longer produced only by humans. The voices here are stalked by eco-grief and loneliness, but they also brim with song and ecstasy, reveling in the strangeness of contemporary life while grieving losses that cannot be restored. Through Fuad’s frank, honest poetry, PORTAL vibrates with pleasure and dread.

Peeling back the surfaces of words to reveal their etymologies, Fuad embraces playfulness through her formal range, engaging styles from the tersely lineated to the essayistic as she intertwines topics of replication, reproduction, technology, language, history, and biology.

Tracy Fuad’s second collection of poetry, PORTAL, won the Phoenix Emerging Poets’ Series and will be published by the University of Chicago Press. She is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and the author of about:blank, a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She lives in Berlin, where she teaches poetry at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator. His most recent book is Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. A forthcoming collection, The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (Coffee House Press) will be published in 2024. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received ALTA’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Cecilia Vicuña, Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work has been recognized with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund; and the Illinois Arts Council.

Jose-Luis Moctezuma is a xicano poet, essayist, and researcher. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Chicago. His chapbook, Spring Tlaloc Seance, was published by Projective Industries in January 2016. His first full-length book, Place-Discipline, was published by Omnidawn in October 2018. Place-Discipline was selected by Myung Mi Kim as the winner of the 2017 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize. His second book, Black Box Syndrome, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in December 2023. He lives and teaches in Chicago.

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Tags: and Jose-Luis Moctezuma, Chicago, Daniel Borzutzky, Lower West Side, Pilsen Community Books, Tracy Fuad