Poet Jaclyn Piudik has an unerring ear for the distillates of language. In To Suture What Frays, one finds a sound-sense flecked with the colloquial, personal, Hebraic and the arcane. Yet, Piudik's polyvalence is new-alive with the sacramental offering that's at the center of all good poetry. Here, the reader will find an edifying and earful poétique. When Piudik writes of "when heart was not a dirty word / or an excuse for a poem / but the edge of adornment / revolved around the geometry / of a soap-stained city," she doesn't eschew the darkness that underpins her song-she embraces it, in a wondrous estrangement that juxtaposes truth and art. There's no doubt that Piudik is fearless in her inventory-no corner of the mind is left unexamined-and yet her work is plural. Where else could one find poems of Shiva, Sex and Reblochon? Amen.
Mark Goldstein, author of Form of Forms (BookThug 2012)
In Jaclyn Piudik's debut book, we find re-collections, lyric narratives and speculations on the chain of becoming. Her poignant poems ask and disclose as they arrive and provoke "the impossible colors of poetry," "a cosmological hunger." The poetry here stitches a human kinship-personal, shared-and the desire that hungers through it all.
Hoa Nguyen, author of Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books 2016), nominated for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.
To Suture What Frays is an incandescent first full-length collection from a poet who draws on a broad array of experience in vibrant cartographies and histories to write the body and soul. Jaclyn Piudik's lyrical voice creates spaces that crackle with meaning, absences where the unsaid holds more than can be spoken. Trained as a scholar in medieval Romance and Hebrew literatures, she brings unique scholarly insight that infuses her strikingly rich poetry with the echoes of medieval dawn songs, French autobiographical lyric and the cadences of Latin. Her poems sing with the dynamism generated by incarnate language that renders the ineffable visible and palpable. Jaclyn Piudik's beautiful poems invite us to hunger for the "impossible colors of poetry" and to immerse ourselves in the elusive, sensuous texture of these achingly beautiful poems.
Jill Ross, Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto; Associate Professor of Medieval Studies
Jaclyn Piudik has authored two chapbooks, Of Gazelles Unheard (Beautiful Outlaw, 2013) and The Tao of Loathliness (fooliar press, 2005/2008). Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Contemporary Verse 2, The New Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, La Presa and New American Writing. She has edited three collections of poetry for award winning Canadian publisher BookThug and is the recipient of a New York Times Fellowship for Creative Writing, and the Alice M. Sellers Award from the Academy of American Poets. Jaclyn holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the City College of New York and a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto.
