Poem Reading: "The Words I Return To" by Magda Isanos

And I loved this accompaniment by critic Leo Zausen on Magda Isanos’ Homecoming:

Life for Isanos is less a vessel but a burden, a preordained fallout at the incursion of the species. Isanos’ romanticism sediments a dwindling of the human side of any encounter by foregrounding the negative manifestation of something subliminal, abyssal, and subterranean in its wake. Not unlike phosphorus—or the cousin of sulfur who is all too at home in hell—an overexposed and exhausted essence streams through these pages, mapping a warped lithospheric geology. Phosphorescent romanticism is a fleeting and ambient style, a maligned neologism to retrogressively define an antiquated literary tone. While Roland Barthes indicates “Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die” (A Barthes Reader) nearly a century prior, Charles Baudelaire would often detect a “phosphorescence of decay” (Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists) emanating from the page, the residue of a degenerate style, prophetic of a coming storm.

The poem "The Words I Return To" by Magda Isanos from the collection Homecoming translated by Christina Tudor-Sidere.

-You can find Homecoming published out of Sublunary Editions here.