***PREORDER*** Oracular Maladies
by Sophia Terazawa
$18.00
Synopsis
A book of curses, Oracular Maladies summons an ecstatic performance of divas arriving in glamorous form. The backdrop: Vietnamese tonality, displacement, and reclamation. Cicadas arrive onstage. Cows arrive onstage. An odyssey of someone walking on her knees across an entire country makes a video onstage. This is Terazawa’s third poetry collection, a wonder of light upon diacritic marks, layers of breathless music uneasy with its hybrid nature.
Contemplating fraught intersections between a mother’s language of Vietnamese and craft considerations of Japanese-English meter, Oracular Maladies forms a series of six spoken “scores” mirroring the tonal arc of a musical variety show familiar to the Vietnamese diaspora, “Paris by Night.” These poems are like a VHS box set dusted off for the first time after decades. Projective verse and prayers flash across the page. The melodrama receives respect.
Blurbs
The best poets not only speak, they look and they listen. I am here for all of it from Sophia Terazawa: “If you must know our language, / there’s a field some call a garden.” Everything is at play in this collection, an inventiveness with form and language that is both redemptive and devastating (“smoke goes everywhere beauty destroys”) Oracular Maladies is a translation of a translation, a performance, and a time machine. And isn’t that really, what grief, exile, family, tradition, and culture is?
Keith S. Wilson
Sophia Terazawa’s Oracular Maladies unfolds with an uncanny cinematic surrealism across 5 scores of inventive, visionary, and hauntologically charged poems, “strong as a day of swallows.” Using what Terazawa calls “curses” these works confront “butcheries of speech;” with an ensemble cast of divas, birds, signs, and languages illuminating “the longing after bombs”. Oracular Maladies invites its reader to be changed by these Chthonic transmissions and to “đi hít mura.”
Angel Dominguez
Oracular Maladies is transcription (of cicadas). It’s a performance score complete with proclamations, observations, directives and curses. Sophia Terazawa never shies away from the torturers, the prisons or the atrocities of colonial destruction, especially in relation to the Vietnam War. However, in Terazawa’s feverdreamscape, there is also a record of pink mesh, “bedazzled taffeta,” colored plastic shoes and Divas and Divos singing from VHS tapes. There is no attuning for the devastation, instead a chorus of grief and ecstasy releases from the mouths of performers, insects, landscapes, and histories. Terazawa writes: “If you must know our language,/ there’s a field some call a garden./ Go there if you can.” Terazawa’s language speaks out of fierce love, evidences an unflinching bravery on the page. Go to this garden! Oracular Maladies is your invitation.
Susan Briante
