The Wug Test
Poems
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
A collection of language-driven, imaginative poetry from the winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series Open Competition.
Jennifer Kronovet’s poetry is inflected by her fraught, ecstatic relationship with language—sentences, words, phonemes, punctuation—and how meaning is both gained and lost in the process of communicating. Having lived all over the world, both using her native tongue and finding it impossible to use, Kronovet approaches poems as tactile, foreign objects, as well as intimate, close utterances.
In The Wug Test, named for a method by which a linguist discovered how deeply imprinted the cognitive instinct toward acquiring language is in children, Kronovet questions whether words are objects we should escape from or embrace. Dispatches of text from that researcher, Walt Whitman, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the poet herself, among other voices, are mined for their futility as well as their beauty, in poems that are technically revealing and purely pleasurable. Throughout, a boy learns how to name and ask for those things that makes up his world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rigorously intellectual and compassionate in its approachability, this second collection from Kronovet (Awayward), a 2015 National Poetry Series winner, employs linguistics research to probe how language makes "the world a glass we fill by speaking." Kronovet astutely observes how people "use words like a tree uses light:/ there is a process we don't see but do." It may go without saying that language shapes experience, and Kronovet's poems are a vital reminder that the saying is all we have; that "Nothing stays inside the body forever." There is a fierce and tender optimism in the notion that "a box can be// a word can be a ship can be/ the blank that takes us to each other." Tenderness is at the core of these poems, and Kronovet turns over each word carefully as only an attentive lover of language can. "We made ourselves through words/ for each other for years. Like trees/ almost make the sky," she writes, hinting at language's limitations, yet choosing instead to offer admiration and awe: "This sounds/ much worse than it is. More like/ how the car makes the road./ Or the runner across the field,/ the park I love him." Even readers who tend to be skeptical of poetry collections that revolve around a project will be charmed by Kronovet.
