Poems written outdoors, in the presence of disappearing glaciers--a book of memory, grief, and transformation.
In her new poetry collection, Memory of a Larger Mind, Daniela Naomi Molnar sifts through memory and layered loss--planetary, cultural, familial, and personal--asking how we withstand and how we transform. These are plein air poems, written outdoors in the presence of disappearing glaciers and composed with shifting light, wind, sound, and scent: elegies and love songs, celebrations and laments. Braiding the slow death of glaciers with her grandmother's survival of the Holocaust, the book holds ecological and ancestral loss in a single frame. Alive to our current moment while keeping one foot in geologic time, Molnar exposes genocide and ecocide as expressions of the same logic, the same movement: ice to water to light, grief to love to joy to grief.
Memory of a Larger Mind is part of a larger interdisciplinary project that gathers pigments, language, and memory from "sacrifice zones"--glaciated landscapes, former concentration and incarceration camps, desecrated sacred sites--and transforms them into poems, paintings, and films. The result is work in which all bodies are understood as dynamic, part of a world in which difficult pasts might open toward more peaceful futures, and in which grief, handled with care, might shift to love.
Related Subjects
Poetry