the black maria has an agenda, but not the one we might expect rather than issuing a call to action for the Eritrean diaspora, the poet employs personal and ancestral experience to catalyze a unified, remembered loss. My routes: Eritrea, Puerto Rico, African America” eventually leads to “let us name every air between strangers ‘Reunion.’” Girmay is a poet of both physical and metaphysical loss, weaving together intimate and communal stories to express the emotional agony of an exploited and paling culture. Girmay starts with an assertion of independence and singularity, but ends with a statement of reunion: “I, Aracelis Kay Weyni Girmay, the narrator-author, born in the United States. The collection explores the inevitable consequences of time, the poems building toward the realization of collective loss. The title, taken from a term for lunar “maria”-the moon’s dark plains once thought to be seas-provides the imagistic thrust of the poems, suggesting the absorbing confusion pushing the poet toward reconciliation. Girmay fastens herself to the idea of water-its power to both unify and alienate-as a vehicle for exploring loss, ancestry, and identity. 'What is of value in a poem besides its meaning?' Zurawski, writing in solitude, seems to offer this answer: the transaction between the reader and the poet.The black maria, Aracelis Girmay’s third book of poetry, seeks to synthesize accounts of the Eritrean diaspora in order to understand place and experience in the 21 st century. Their lines, skinny and brusque, feel precarious. Zurawski is a writer with nothing to say and everything to feel because the poems are not charged with having to be about anything. Jennifer Moxley, Poetry Society of America They refuse cynicism and pretense, and such a refusal explodes any possibility of intellectual distancing or emotional hiding. These poems are hyper-aware of their contradictions, yet completely emotionally vulnerable. She is currently Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

She has lived in Berlin, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Durham, NC where she ran the Minor American Reading Series.

She attended Brown University where she studied with poets Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, C.D. Magdalena Zurawski is the author of The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom(Wave Books, 2019), the novel The Bruise, which won the Ronald Sukenick Award from FC2 in 2008 and a LAMBDA literary award in 2009, and the collection of poems Companion Animal, which was published by Litmus Press in 2015 and won a Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.

The Bruise by Magdalena Zurawski