Shattered fragments of verse revelatory
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In the minimalist poems of her collection, Wound Archive (The Porcupine’s Quill, unpaginated, $20), Anna Veprinska scores the page with shattering fragments, accruing an archive of “Language/ tossed/ from uvula to uvula/ like a pinball/ on which we choke.”
Invisible chronic illness and the concurrent end of a romantic relationship stretch the possibilities of language and its relation to the page. While Wound Archive in part chronicles the “Syllables/ extracted/ like teeth:/what language cannot do,” rather than breaking, they open to new connections and ways of understanding.
These poems transform language, image and poetic convention by abrading the page with syntax compressed almost to the point of implosion. “The compulsive relearning/ of grief —/ it’s creas ed wetness.// Raw writhing/ flesh — laughing haunted.” In the third line, Veprinska breaks “creased” and folds it, scoring the page to reinforce the semantic meaning of the line. This, along with the visual alliteration between “wetness” and “writhing,” and the aural alliteration between “raw” and “writhing,” ground the poem in viscerality, which is in tension with the invisibility of heartbreak and chronic illness as well as the delicate way Veprinska scores the page.
In her debut collection, Precedence (Brick Books, 96 pages, $24), Pujita Verma calls attention to the way legal language constrains the possible understandings of sexual violence and its aftermath. These poems are clear about the limits of legal remedies, even as these are often foregrounded in public discourse.
In Double Criminality, Verma moves through ways justice and criminality are culturally determined: “just as moral// relativism confines what is right or wrong,/ our ideas of what is deserved// can be territorially tested.” This truth is held in tension with the legal language that “permeates all spheres of my life” and the justice system that constrains the survivor of abuse as much as it does the perpetrator. From the publication ban that silences the speaker to “being told to stay/ away from home & turn off/ your locations. enter: the spring/ of geographic exile.”
In Wildfire Waking, Verma frames the questions of violence and justice she interrogates throughout the collection in the context of climate change catastrophes. The poem opens when the speaker is a child bearing witness to a wildfire from the back of her family’s minivan. Wildfires connect that childhood experience to the present: “this is how we swallow headlines (…) don’t we all breathe in parallel times?”
Just as the justice system seems to reach into all aspects of the speaker’s life, so too wildfires are “relentless in their reach and isn’t this/ just another kind of danger/ that demands leaving home/ without any end in sight.”
“I should have begun by saying/ that I lost my mother tongue,” writes Adriana Onita early in Descântec For My Split Tongue (Palimpsest, 100 pages, $22). In this collection, which moves seamlessly between English and Romanian, Onita considers the ways in which language is lost and the ways it refuses to be lost.
In Limba Materna, the speaker qualifies the nature of the loss. “I did not,” she writes, “deem Romanian/ inconvenient.” Rather, Romanian “disappeared inside corpul meu (my body)/ and I know it’s still there.” What follows are searching poems that call forth language and, more importantly, the intimate connections between language, memory, and community.
The collection is structured as a descântec, which is “a prayer-spell-incantation performed to unravel curses, to heal, to protect, and to restore balance.” The title poem, in which Onita stages a ritual encounter with Death, epitomizes the movement and mystery of the collection as a whole: “Death has crafted a descântec for my split tongue and swears me to secrecy (…) I cannot reveal what happened next, dar pot sa (but I can say) that I will never have to cross those tracks again.”
Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen’s first collection The Night, The Knife, The River will be published by At Bay Press in the fall of 2026.
