Torpor isn’t one of the affects Sianne Ngai attends to in her book, Ugly Feelings. However, the notion that torpor would qualify as an affective state, litely oppressive, ubiquitous, and pervasive (though not in an insidiousness way), feels about right. How Fuad occupies these living moments in her poems. The pressing desire for children. The constant reminders of failed romance. What appears to be the kind of isolation we all recognize from the pandemic. All these concerns occupy the book. What might have contributed to a “tonal register” when we talked about poems in the 1990s. Then along came Affect Theory, and “tone” got a more refined articulation. It made “tone” feel like a coarse, blunt-objecti-ish poetic terms. Maybe I’d describe Fuad’s tone as “depressive.” But the poems feel more worldly, and particular to the poet’s life, and conscious of the contemporary.
Meaning, really, it’s hard to describe the tonal state Fuad’s book exists in. It’s even hard to identify its affective state. I use “torpor” because one of the book’s sections is named that. The poet is pregnant in some of the poem. She’s eager to be pregnant in other poems. She works outside the United States. She is often weighted with a concern to really understand what concerns her. And out of those layering concerns, a series of impressions emerge. But those impressions aren’t presented in a syllogistic style. Impression A juxtaposed to Impression B is not going to logically drive the reader to discover Impression C spelling it all out. Because it wouldn’t be accurate to pin all these concerns to logical causality. Is the poet just experiencing the irritation of travel? Is it the unsettled feeling when you’re living in a different country? Is displacement about being removed from what’s familiar or is displacement a construct to reason out why you’re absorbing your surroundings so they feel familiar enough?
Maybe everything depends on context. For instance, there’s a lot about place in Fuad’s book. And the inescapable contrast between being from somewhere and not feeling like you can necessarily find the somewhere you’re supposed to be from. The opening poem, “Song,” doesn’t necessarily feel like anywhere, but it’s definitely somewhere. It’s where the poet’s child will be born. So should all these objects around her, the slug, the opera singers upstairs, the plants in the garden, they should all represent something. And yet whatever the context of that something, Fuad’s poems question their connecting tissue. What establishes her subject position? And how does that subject position belong in this context? Apply that to almost any of the subjects appearing Fuad’s book. Pregnancy. The internet. Fate. The pandemic. All can be elaborated into a contextual fabric. And all wonder aloud the material that might make up that fabric.
Last week I was reading Elisa Gabbert’s essay, “Second Selves.” And one of its main concerns is how the act of writing gets in the way of remembering. There’s something similar in Fuad’s book. Yes, when she’s thinking of displacement in terms of the place she is currently living, there are echoes of the classic definition associated with alienation. Fuad feels this. But Fuad’s poems recognize their performance. They are the act of writing. And the writing itself can either distract from alienation or amplify it. Every impression, as it’s written, takes on its own resonance. And that resonance is, then, an action verb for her mind or her self. Where thinking and perspective contribute to the contextual fabric. Perhaps dreams serve as an especial resonance, connecting memories like ligatures connect parts of a body? But can those types of connections be trusted? Why wouldn’t they be? If she questions their unreality does that further further swell her alienation?
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.