A collection of language-driven, imaginative poetry from the winner of
the 2015 National Poetry Series Open Competition.
Jennifer Kronovet's poetry is inflected by her fraught, ecstatic
relationship with language--sentences, words, phonemes, punctuation--and
how meaning is both gained and lost in the process of communicating.
Having lived all over the world, both using her native tongue and
finding it impossible to use, Kronovet approaches poems as tactile,
foreign objects, as well as intimate, close utterances.
In The Wug Test, named for a method by which a linguist discovered how
deeply imprinted the cognitive instinct toward acquiring language is in
children, Kronovet questions whether words are objects we should escape
from or embrace. Dispatches of text from that researcher, Walt Whitman,
Ferdinand de Saussure, and the poet herself, among other voices, are
mined for their futility as well as their beauty, in poems that are
technically revealing and purely pleasurable. Throughout, a boy learns
how to name and ask for those things that makes up his world.