From a dazzling array of poetic techniques, Fuad's use of repetition to fashion pitch-perfect lyrics stands out, from tiny syllabic songs—'the inking of a ginkgo leaf'—to complex, emotionally freighted refrains, 'my mother’s mother’s remains remain at the morgue.' . . . For Fuad, language is a stubborn, tangible thing that bruises the body and, as the speaker says, created a 'swollen spot on the roof of my mouth where it met my teeth.' . . . Fuad's captivating poetry is totally her own."
― Booklist starred review
Being more “connected” than ever to the world, there can be a strange sensation in trying to determine where we end and where everything else begins. Fuad is the poet of this porous feeling, and she follows the tides of that ever-changing boundary. With its inventive, precise language, Portal makes clarity from noise.
The sophomore volume from Fuad examines the complicated experience of parenthood in a world shadowed by climate anxiety and postcolonial tradition. These pieces wrestle with technology, etymology, language, and biology.
—Publisher’s Weekly
"I had been trained my whole life for this wanting, ' writes Fuad in this astonishing collection. PORTAL maps the folds and membranes, the sentient recursive topographies of an extraordinary poetic consciousness. A sequence of thought unfolds - line by line - each step bridging voids of reference: the economic, the linguistic, the sensual. We are guided through a dimensional journey over thresholds we were unable to perceive until guided by this poet's vision."
—Monica Youn
"One might call PORTAL the present dread of future shock. Fuad's is a poetry of taut vibration, of quaver or vibrato culminating in a crescendo of unsettled feeling. Powerfully arranging the personal and the public, the poet has set a collection of arguments and dreads, hopes and curiosities that work at micro, meso, and macro levels . . . of anxious bodies at risk and the land as a site of antagonism/estrangement. Fuad seems tonally skeptical that regeneration will save us, in a here and now where and when blight upon arrival and reproduction is 'the point of a screw.' (F)utilitarian. Still, PORTAL plays out Fuad's desire for a child even as she anticipates imminent dispossession. It's these tightly composed conflicts that make for a dynamic and bracing read of love as accompaniment to dislocation and alienation"
—Douglas Kearney
"PORTAL leads you into a world of objects, songs, slugs, whole days--whose etched precision is haunted by an enormity of hyper- and hypo-sensitized consciousness, of Being, dare I say of Soul--of restless Soul. It is a hot summer. Everyone is being watched. The speaker herself is creeping on the Instagram of her ex. A baby is born. Language itself weighs elegiacally upon a voice whose grammar feels like exile. This is a book of possession and dispossession. A world watching itself dissolve, a heart beating behind the world: wildly awake, and lit by shocking sunlight."
—Ariana Reines
"The gene-editing technology CRISPR works by looking for palindromes in genetic code, snipping the line just there, and splicing in new material. I thought of this while reading Fuad's PORTAL—how sound and thought and poetry arrive, split us open, and go off somewhere else, and we are the point of that snip, that splice, that split, rather than anything's origin. But who is doing the snipping—the fates, the gods, the rich? The sheer, mercurial stuff of PORTAL will synch you to its thinking til you wake with your locks in the sink and the shears in your hand."
—Joyelle McSweeney