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ABOUT:BLANK

chosen by Claudia Rankine as the winner of the 2020 Donald Hall Prize

PRAISE FOR ABOUT:BLANK

The poems bare the authoritative structures that control or muzzle identity, language, and borders. Fuad’s writing is elegant and active, firmly asserting her own powers of expression, a voice that is resilient, exciting, and one we’ll be reading in years to come. —Chicago Review of Books

Fuad’s multi-layered and intersectional project in about:blank embodies the consequences of a global culture in which manipulations and interpretations of experience are taken to be the experience itself. —Fence

“A testament to the twenty-first century's unending disorder” —ALA Booklist

"about:blank is an extremely smart book, and Fuad's curiosity is as engaging as it is engaged, all the more impressive when one considers this her full-length debut." —Rob McLennan

Tracy Fuad’s about: blank powerfully explores languages driven to the margins by our inexorable march towards progress. She chronicles the Kurdish ruins that evidence occupation or the evolution of words like buttons that can describe the domestic to weapons of mass destruction. She elegizes the exile of our sentient bodies in this anthropocene era of digital capitalism. Her monostix lines are glitchy content streams, haunting as they are present, deadly funny as they are deadly serious. Fuad’s poetry is absolutely unsettling and breathtaking. —Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

Like Venn diagrams, these poems overlap the poet’s Kurdish positionality with cyberfeminist codes, seeking possible relations and pathways of communication. Half-written sentences, abandoned thoughts, stutters, and impenetrable utterances exist alongside detailed and astute observances, plaintive statements of loneliness, joy, or frustration. Like the course of a life, not every moment in this innovative collection yields to its reader; but about:blank’s collective force trembles with formal brilliance and originality. —Claudia Rankine

Tracy Fuad has an overflowing, overwhelming gift, and to receive it is to perceive, in glimmers, a faraway song sung intimate, a difficult place made home. As far as this poet travels, her heart ventures ever further, like a stone skipped for the reader to glimpse what depths and thirsts lie ahead. about:blank is part love letter, part letter to the editor of this warring and scarred world—the poet’s tether to it a braid of desire, devotion, abjection. This book will travel with me, as love travels a soul, always finding some new way to be. —Brenda Shaughnessy

In her boldly experimental debut, Fuad has built a whole multiverse: a poetics which inhabits a future conditional, holding the weight of Kurdish lineage, against a contemporary technoscape where “we’re deeply programmed.” Where else can a poetics where “chronology could fail like anything else” turn but the infinite refractions of body, of body despite? —Triquartlery

"Poems both computationally and ecologically inspired, speaking both intimately and beyond the failed imaginations of country, poems interested in form, glitch, & experimentation as much as they are interested in the (dis)embodiments of language itself. Folks who liked LOOK by Solmaz Sharif will likely be a big fan of this book." --George Abraham

“The landscape surrounding the speaker, both its contemporary form and its history, inform many of Fuad’s poems in about:blank. Fuad overlays personal history with Kurdish history, both near and distant.” —Annulet