Mandible Wishbone Solvent - (Phoenix Poets) by Asiya Wadud (Paperback)

About the Book

"Brooklyn-based poet Asiya Wadud's fifth collection of poetry, Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent, engages migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art-though not necessarily in that order-with a dynamic urgency and graceful restraint held in balance by a deep literary investment in the historical aesthetics of abstraction. Punctuated by images of Wadud's own original art, the poems and prose of Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent offer an indirect meditation of the concepts of the drift ("Embedded in the act of drift can be the prior commitment or desire against drifting") and the isthmus ("An isthmus is a passageway, a threshold, underbrush, thicket, and deliverance"). Wadud constructs a latticework through which language circulates and creates new patterns that probe the natural world's edges, fissures, gaps, and seams. Further, the lyric poems suggest a relationship between speaker and environment that yearns to invert or dissolve the subject-object divide, creating instead an isthmus that joins and allows a drifting between them"--

Book Synopsis

A poetry collection that brings together word, image, and sound to reflect on fractured, fragmentary states of being.

The poetry of Mandible Wishbone Solvent is situated in the space of bridges, fragmentary overlays, spectral reach, and the desire to keep reaching. Asiya Wadud's poems engage in this act, not to stake a claim or to fasten themselves, but to hold fragments together in order to offer possibilities for connection and extension. Throughout the collection lies an acknowledgment that any hold will drift, meander, and find new paths, with each separation making space for new entanglements. Drawing on a keen interest in tactility and ekphrasis, Wadud mines the repetition and extension that comes with any fractured state of existence and considers the nature of a residual and roving we.

Following this selection of lyrical, ekphrastic, fragmented poems, the book concludes with two prose pieces that dwell on the concepts of "isthmus" and "drift," respectively, which offer further grounds for contemplation and provide a frame for the poems.

Review Quotes

"Thoreau's God is impressive in scope. Through extensive research and review of Thoreau's voluminous writing, Higgins chronicles the lifelong evolution of his belief, from his early disparaging of Christianity and the church to his 'eclectic, experiential, noninstitutional spirituality' which is so popular today."-- "The Christian Century"

"Asiya Wadud's Mandible Wishbone Solvent approaches instability with a fervor and nuance acknowledging the inability for logical coherence while maintaining the transformative power of change."-- "The Colorado Review"

"A grueling yet gratifying must-read . . . Mandible Wishbone Solvent is a wonderfully confusing yet revolutionary read, despite its mere 88 pages. . . Wadud creatively combines visual art, poetry, and prose while always granting each element its own space to shine."-- "Harvard Crimson"

"Wadud is an astute interpreter of the world as a text. She shows us how the physical space rendered (un)available to those fleeing disaster is akin to the conceptual breadth lacking in our minds: 'If we cannot imagine a destitute journey, one born in an urgency that forces someone to voyage across borders, then it is in that moment that it is possible to empty water from jugs, again and again.' Wadud asks readers to match her connective brilliance by turning toward the world with a discerning eye, daring us to expand our minds and behold complexity. Her poems refuse to surrender to a reading that is easily impressed with her syntactic mosaic."-- "Harriet Books"

"Composed of lyric poems, artwork, and prose, Mandible Wishbone Solvent distinguishes itself in both form and inquiry from much of the poetry currently published in the US. Wadud's aesthetic, in which the lyric permutates, shifts, and merges with what flows through, is ethically aligned, as the prose makes clear, with shifting natural (rather than unyielding geopolitical) borders and with those who are ejected and must drift from place to place. Gorgeous, meditative, and spiritual, this immersive collection offers a terrain of lush language that seems precarious and vulnerable but is ultimately ungovernable, by border patrol or otherwise. 'How can we become capacious in our rendering of the journey itself?' Wadud asks. And this book is an example, with every gesture, of that elasticity and generosity."--Rosa Alcalá, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "MyOther Tongue"

"Wadud's astounding new poems--many of them ekphrastic, all of them rigorously intricate, supersaturated--come across to me as both hard-edged and liminal. Enacting the dynamic relationship between figure and ground, center and edge, they frame the constant unfolding of meaning's dimensions, its reverberations."--Mónica de la Torre, author of "Repetition Nineteen"

About the Author

Asiya Wadud is the author of several poetry collections, including, most recently, No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Her writing has been published in e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine, Triple Canopy, Poetry, Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Finnish Cultural Institute of New York, Rosendal Theater Norway, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, and Beirut Arts Center, among others. Wadud lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches poetry at Saint Ann's School and Columbia University.