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About The Slowdown:
Poet Major Jackson is your guide on the pathways to feel and understand our common journey – through poetry. In sharing poems, we take a moment to pause and acknowledge the world’s magnitude, and how poets illuminate that mystery. Join The Slowdown for a poem and a moment of reflection in one short episode, every weekday. Produced by APM Studios in partnership with The Poetry Foundation and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
About A. D. Lauren-Abunassar’s collection Coriolis:
The Coriolis effect—from which A. D. Lauren-Abunassar’s hyperkinetic debut collection borrows its title—describes a force that deflects a mass off course. This concept is at play both formally and psychically in Coriolis, recognized in Leila Chatti’s Foreword as “a book of wanting, of lack, absence, disintegration, opacity, and yearning. . . . ‘If only I could cut out the part of me shaped like wanting,’ writes Lauren-Abunassar. At times, the thing wanted for is love. Other times: family, certainty, belonging, home, safety, wellness, wholeness, or simply for a thing to be clean. Always, these poems reveal the shape of the want by illuminating its outline.” Perhaps the speaker of these poems wants most of all to be seen, despite her reflex to deflect when she discloses a shame or trauma, often by depositing the self-revelation within rapid, teeming strings of thought. Yet as much as this speaker may be an introvert in life—“Every time someone says my name it surprises me”; “Because I am lonely, I am always shying away from the mirror”; “Today I woke up feeling / like an already said thing”—many of her utterances are exuberantly uninhibited. “Small trees live inside me,” Lauren-Abunassar admits passingly in one poem. And in another: “When I dream of myself, my mouth / blooms many hands. They reach in all / shapes and directions.”