PORTAL
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.
Tracy Fuad
Tracy Fuad is a poet and writer based in Berlin. Her second collection of poetry, PORTAL (University of Chicago Press, 2024; the87press, 2026), won the Phoenix Emerging Poets’ Prize. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Fuad’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Poetry Daily, and Poem-a-Day and have been translated into Kurdish, Turkish, German, and Spanish. She lives in Berlin, where she teaches poetry and directs the Berlin Writers’ Workshop. She is currently at work on a novel.