Maya C. Popa, WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER

WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER, Maya C. Popa, Norton, 2023.

In the opening poem in this collection, “Dear Life,” Popa writes, “I can’t undo all I have done to myself / what I have let an appetite for love to do me.” These lines set the tone for a book that again and again catches us on its barbed hook. Language hooks us. Ghost crabs are a “speculation on shape,” water, “an artifact of loneliness.” Can I capture the essence of this book after only one reading? Probably not.

Wound Is the Origin of Wonder

The bee that worshiped the mouths of those flowers
dropped to your window like a spent priest,
its thud comedic in the coded silence.
You were making a change to the order of your hours,
had announced as much in the prior moment,
and if I thought of Virgil’s Georgics, it was only
not to mention them. I brought up my eye
to its abdomen, offered an ounce of my human life.
What would you do with the knowledge
that I’d grieve for a bee? Someone like me
could be played by the threat of endings.
I’ll lose you one day, have lost you always,
a long ongoing Westwardness of thought.
It’s not metaphor that bees make honey
of themselves while language only dreams
the hunted thing. Let’s be hungry a little
while longer. Let’s not hurt each other if we can.

—Maya C. Popa (p. 32)

Toward the end of the book, toward the end of a long poem, “Pestilence,” Popa writes: “Each day I remember /
Each day I strategically forgot,” and “how human     is the future / will it let us let / I am listening through my terror for yours…”

Olawaseum Olayiwola in The Guardian described Wound Is the Origin of Wonder as “purposefully heart-decelerating.” It balances contemplation with a sense of walking through the natural world, balances woundedness with a deep, profound healing. I’m wholly intrigued.

Learn (much) more by visiting Popa’s website or Poetry Foundation.