Books

The Wug Test, Ecco

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.

Awayward, BOA Editions

“Nothing strikes me/ as incredibly 'foreign,' ” says Kronovet in her whimsical, searching debut, selected by Jean Valentine for BOA's A. Poulin Jr. prize. Restlessly obsessed with travel and with awakening to the strangeness of the familiar, what Kronovet means is that, in fact, everything is foreign, which is its least incredible trait; what may be the most common fact on earth is transformed by revitalizing and humorous language: “The earth's humus is made fertile/ through the worm's anus.” In every poem, Kronovet searches “the corners/ of fact” and finds unusual things in plain sight, such as “light that makes the country classically itself,” “the three-wheeled taxi” and “A kind of clean./ The dirty kind.” These free verse lyrics, stacks of narrow couplets, prose poems and poems in two lines (“One way to avoid attention:/ Go. Go. Go. Go. Go”) are at once endearing and deadly serious; in even the slightest of these poems, the stakes are high and surprising. Throughout, Kronovet's playfully earnest speaker is ever approaching and fleeing a beloved, who is at once traveling companion, unexplored country and home, and for whom she says, “I hold softly, I eat sweetly/ try to be to you newly.” PUBLISHER WEEKLY REVIEW