Wild Fin

Monica Mody | WILD FIN | WEAVERS PRESS

2024 — ISBN: 9798987215227

Cover Art: Anne Marguerite Herbst, Lighthouse Present (detail)

Praise

"Monica Mody’s soulful new poetry collection, Wild Fin, weaves the reader through an eclectic warp and weft of grief and fury, rupture and suture, mysticism and calls for climate and social justice. A healer in the guise of a poet, Mody asks, “when do we stop seeing, being seen?... How will you unbend? / Of what is the new world made?” and reminds us of “what the body remembers.” With artful line breaks and lush language that imbue rich layers of meaning, these poems demonstrate “writing’s capacity to un-silence” with “words [that] flock together into language that will change skies.”"
--MAW SHEIN WIN

"In Wild Fin, Monica Mody remembers “polysemic events,” while enacting a “penumbra of becoming.” She reminds us that life and death are doubles of each other while attending to the problem of gratitude vs. unfinished business. Wild Fin feels like home while teaching us that home is a fabulation."
--CARRIE HUNTER

"A deeply personal and tender contemplation of ecological grief which, in impressionistic and reflective disclosures, asks us to acknowledge our inalienable enmeshment with each other and with the earth. Monica’s eyes turn upward to a “sky laid waste” and inward, where she is keenly aware that “We long to be porous to another’s knowing.” This book expands our understanding of how transspecies compassion must learn to swim in the dark and deep water of human migrations."
--DIVYA VICTOR

"Reading Wild Fin, I was struck by Monica's question, ‘is there a reason ancestors brought us together?’ Like here today, now? These poems are seekers, whose project is to harness, no, a softer word, to gather and witness our innate divine intuition. These are poems that sing of song (‘we’re singing into a red bowl & bowl upturned sings from our heads’) of what brings us together in song, and in collective breath—a knowledge made more stark by our collective breathing of particulate ash and stymied air—bringing us into a ‘sheer mystic belonging’ of our dire situation, our climate grief. But here is a poet who transmutes disaster, not quite by oppositizing but by being a poet who walks on her hands ‘if not in body in word’—what is the poetic equivalent of walking on your hands? Literally turning the thing on its head. We’re in the hologram together, she says. Or more precisely, resonating together as shakti, divine cosmic feminine energy, beyond shaman, beyond humanimal, all one pre-lingual wild self, but paradoxically one who can speechify, who can shape speech. A poet in the weeds of the river rescuing divinity from the chokeholds of patriarchy. Like a ‘river whose waters billow with hymns.’"
--JULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI

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