Post-Volcanic Folk Tales
Raised in a household of paprika in New Jersey by her homesick maternal grandmother--a refugee of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and ensuing refugee crisis--Mackenzie necessarily explores prescribed responsibilities of diasporic only daughterhood. While shepherding her beloved grandmother through hospice at home, Mackenzie wanders into slippery and informative familial-folkloric reveriescapes by way of amuletic diacritical vowels, gathering cartographic knowledge from her grandmother's body, name, language, personal possessions, and stories. Mackenzie desperately records her grandmother's waning memories cratered by suicide, occupation, revolution, forced exodus, homesickness, and progressive dementia, while simultaneously condemning violent political conditions and interrogating intergenerational psychoemotional curses and ethics of witnessing. What do we give each other?
A phantasmagorical train station--shared and frequented by generations of living and deceased women relatives with pervasive medical histories of autoimmunity--materializes for her dreamlike peregrinations, tender questions, vulnerable unsnarlings, and spectral cycle-breaking communions. In Post-Volcanic Folk Tales, Mackenzie is devoted yet vitally disobedient, her world-breaking-and-building is both factual and folkloric. Here, Mackenzie practices her ancestral language of horses, reflects upon imperfections of remembrance, demonstrates violences of national victimhood, and troubles perceptions and illusions of death, time, and belonging. Here, she reconceptualizes guardian angels, explores complexities of "matriviticultural" psychoemotional inheritance and familial illness, and ultimately archives, grieves, and names her rage by way of imaginative invention.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
This ferocious debut reads like no other. Where grief and exuberance dance under an encauldroned blood moon, mellifluous pyrotechnic incantatas hurl cacophonous fissile sparks, the unsung summoned into being. I am astounded by the invention and necessity of Mackenzie Polonyi's mutating forms, multigenerational matriarchy writ mythically large and tragically precise in the wide wake of displacement.--Timothy Liu, author of Down Low and Lowdown
In Mackenzie Polonyi's stunning debut collection, the human body becomes a landscape inscribed by multigenerational story, memory, and trauma. In these visceral lyric poems, boundaries between self and nature dissolve. Polonyi unearths ancestral connections--'stone ruins cob-webbing my sternum'--as her symptoms and injuries merge with her suspended yet rooted foremothers' own ruptures. An alchemical blend of folklore and science preserves rituals like 'pigeon-milk' tonics amid seismic turbulence, propelling Polonyi's searing language. Wonderfully kaleidoscopic in its exploration of a scattered and often uncertain identity, this book transports readers into realms where memories ossify into 'rusted peafowl-blue' relics. Blistering yet nurturing, Post-Volcanic Folk Tales reckons with how inherited psychic and corporeal complexities ultimately give rise to a profoundly compassionate yet questioning devotion, revealing: 'my hands / they are becoming your hands' across endless loss and regeneration. Look out! This book will change you.--Christopher Salerno, author of The Man Grave
