![]() ![]() Medin texts her mother questions to learn more about her family history, but her mother skips four of them. Access to these letters is complicated by their destruction-Medin's mother ripped all the other letters to shreds after reading them-and the poet revisits this destruction in a visual erasure, an image at the beginning of the book which includes small wound-shaped cuts from letters (see below). Medin’s maternal grandmother wrote 126 letters to her mother, but only two of these letters remain, both of which center her work as a seamstress. The tension between preservation and restoration emerges in the book’s letters and epistolary forms. Rejecting assimilationist demands to stay alienated from her origins, Medin seeks an inhabitable, unfinished temporality, a whole fragment, a poem that never ends, an ongoing dialogue with her mother and history. The weighted words are critical to the final poem, constructed from these raised-stitch words.īecause distance demands its own time, this book fashions a temporality that limns the gaps between space, language, and silence. ![]() This bolding-sound operates at two levels: a symbolic one, which highlights the deafness on her maternal side, and a scriptural one, which posits the narrator as the amanuensis, recording words. In bolding certain words, Medin alters the visual field but also the audible one: the bolded words sound louder than others. I wonder if the voice I hear when I'm struggling is an echo of that voice: tell Silvina to write. There my mother's mother says, “Tell Silvina to write to me.” I was barely 4, I couldn't write at all. Remembered voices exist in dialogue with the text, as in “Brooklyn, October 20, Later”: In “Brooklyn, September 6, 2018,” the speaker reveals how she will expand time to accommodate the missing, the absent, the presence in the present. Her mother's mother abandoned her mother for three years, from ages three to six, and Medin considers this action, this absence of a mother in her own mother's formative years, across the text, making use of diary forms in order to reflect on the intersection with her own life. You're pulling.Ībandonment haunts the lyrical and material text. And yet, you are a mother, she's your mother's mother. This is not your daughter, this is not you. The speaker lays out the process, which mimics cutting fabrics for patterns prior to stitching the parts together: You'd rather have the word repeated- mother-build a chain with no missing ring. You cross out the word grandmother, you'll say your mother's mother. “The Sound of Blinds Being Pulled Up is the First Sound,” a prose poem narrated in second-person, explains the work that “mother” will do as lineage: She begins by addressing her mother in Argentina. Writing from Brooklyn, where she lives with her sons, Medin dedicates the book to her mother and sons. But the old words are not disappeared by the new ones. It will grow a new skin, a soft skin nourished by the climate, a skin marked in new words which the locals can understand. The poem never ends because the edge is always expectant, always waiting for something to be added to it. Continuing the cinematic and visual palettes of Excursion, her 2019 chapbook, Medin explores ontological division as its own modality, rather than a rupture which needs suturing. “In this piece, language is a necessary distance,” she writes, referring to both the book and the fragment. In this book, Medin works from the existing materials of family and history, chronicling an intimacy of phrases and edges, exposing the seams in silence, while also creating one “piece” composed from stitched fragments. A selvedge needs no hem or bias tape, no additional finishing work to prevent the fabric from coming apart. Through Medin's use of fragmented materials, the connection to sewing complicates the location of edges.Ĭhing-In Chen, who selected this book as the winner of 2019 Bethell Book Contest, calls it “a story about linearity of edge,” though it feels closer to selvedge, which is the self-finished edge of a piece of fabric that prevents it from unraveling or fraying. Silvina López Medin's Poem That Never Ends, her first collection written in English rather than in her native Spanish, brought the formal considerations of sewing to mind. Learning to sew, I discovered the choice of fabric determines what can be created from it the textures and thread pattern of the materials determine the stitch. ![]()
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