Year
I wouldn't be who I amif I could bear the foliage,the hour losingits precious lightlike a knight bleeding outthrough a hole in the armor.I wouldn't be, if I could,any more than that—light on burnt leaveswhile the hurt workedits anchor, the chain easedslowly like a tongue,a word for grief thatdoesn't rhyme with thief.Any day now, autumn.Winter any day.I've shot my arrowand lived by its arcand still, the hourswon't acquit.The first time we metwe said goodbye,then we never stoppedsaying it.
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- November 8, 2022
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“Year” from WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER: by Maya C. Popa.
Published by W. W. Norton & Company on November 8, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya C. Popa.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Maya C. Popa is the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022) and American Faith (Sarabande 2019). She is the Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly and a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, writing on the role of wonder in poetry. She teaches at NYU and elsewhere.
New York, New York
"Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is stunning for how it miraculously balances tenderness and terror, poems of hovering anxiety and longing that also allow themselves to be turned toward pleasure. I am now, as always, thankful for poems that balance the fullness of the human experience. Maya C. Popa has done that here."
— Hanif Abdurraqib
"I am stuck in an almost life, / in an almost time,’ Maya C. Popa writes in the titular poem from Wound Is the Origin of Wonder. Suspended in the uncanny amber of such a time, such a place, we readers encounter ourselves, endlessly reprocessing our own pasts and worrying our futures as the vast roiling moment corrodes both. Still, Popa insists upon, if not hope exactly, then a world beyond the hopelessness this one inspires: ‘There are still things that cannot be imagined.’ Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is a complex, searching collection, one I will be returning to for years."
—Kaveh Akbar
"‘Dear Life,’ the opening poem of Maya C. Popa’s stunning Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, is worth the price of entry on its own. If I’d stopped there, this book would have given me more than I’d hoped for, but who could stop? Each poem, every single one, startled me with its precision and clarity. At times I gasped. Of course wonder is related to wound, awe to pain, and ‘every bright thing has at its heart a hiddenness / it offers when you’ve just about stopped looking.’ So we keep looking. We keep going. When I reached the end of this book, I wasn’t ready for its spell to be broken, not yet, so I began it again."
—Maggie Smith
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