This month we are celebrating the titles that we’ve acquired in the past six months. These manuscripts came to us through our open reading periods. Today we bring you Marcela Sulak, author of the poetry collection City of Skypapers, which will be published in 2020. This will be Marcela’s fourth title with Black Lawrence Press.
Have a manuscript you think we’d like? During our November Open Reading Period we are looking for poetry (chapbooks and full-length collections), short fiction (again, both chapbooks and full-length collections), novels, novellas, nonfiction (CNF, biography, cultural studies) and translations from German. Also, our Big Moose Prize for the novel is currently open to early bird submissions.
The Author
Marcela Malek Sulak is the author of two previous Black Lawrence Press poetry titles, Decency (2015) and Immigrant (2010), as well as the forthcoming lyric memoir, Mouth Full of Seeds (2020). She’s co-edited with Jacqueline Kolosov the 2015 Rose Metal Press title Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Sulak, who translates from the Hebrew, Czech, and French, is a 2019 NEA Translation Fellow, and her fourth book-length translation of poetry: Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, was nominated for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translaiton (University of Texas Press). She’s also translation Karel Hynek Macha’s May and Karel Jaromir Erben’s Bouquet of Czech Folktales (Twisted Spoon Press), and Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha’s Bela-Wenda (Host Publications), from the French. Her essays have appeared in The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, and Rattle, among others. She coordinates the poetry track of the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University, where she is an associate professor in American Literature.
On Writing City of Skypapers
City of Skypapers was an effort of daily writing in Tel Aviv for a span of about three years during which time I tried to inhabit and reconcile Jewish sacred time (holidays, Shabbat, daily prayer rituals) with private, social, and civil secular time—two wars with their worries and missiles, explosions, and a sense of solidarity, as well, with beloved friends in Gaza or West Bank, a custody lawsuit, daily small-scale agriculture, running along the Yarkon river, riding public transportation in Tel Aviv and Ramat-Gan, teaching, friendship, love and its disappointments, mothering. It attempts an openness to the daily world, and an attention to these details, charged by an interpenetration of the sacred and the secular, aspirations and reality. I wanted to mimic in writing the way the mind works, the reality its imagination builds, the relationships it creates, among people, objects, and geography.
My technique involved a morning ritual of moving through time in space—running, bussing, urban farming, preparation for Shabbat or holiday or for work, all the while attending to the details of the ritual. I would write down observations, and then, to separate out what was essential, I would place the writing in a poetic form—ottava rima, sonnet, heroic couplet, or syllabic, usually. Sometimes the forms fit, and highlighted the essential. Sometimes the forms did not, and I let them fall, but the exercise was useful in identifying the heart of each piece. Sometimes the routines were disrupted by war, internal travel, bureaucracy gone awry, and other trauma. These provided intense opportunities of observance and attention to the human condition in the worlds we create, and the worlds that were made before we arrived on the scene.
Excerpts
When I sit and when I stand,
when I wake and when I fall asleep
I am thinking of it, it is a slight
pressure on the stomach the length of a
finger, it is the sudden ambiguous
movement, as if from a field of zinnias
a kingfisher shot out of view before
the eye could register it, it might not
have been a kingfisher, I might have
just imagined it, it could happen
at any moment, I might have
already missed it, it might not
even exist except in thinking
about it, which I never do,
except when I sit and when I stand,
when I wake and before I fall
asleep, when I go out along the road,
when the chain comes off my bike
and I yank it from the gears
and lift the rear tire, and guide
it back on, when I wipe my hands
of grease, when I run along the river,
when I get home with my dirt-streaked
legs, while I am grinding coffee, while
I am waiting for it to boil, while I am
selecting clothes pins for the socks
and snap them to the line, which will
break sooner, rather than later, and I
say this, too, will happen sooner
rather than later, the laundry line
has been repaired with plastic twine,
with ribbons from boxes of chocolate,
when I set the table, when I remove
the plates, when the water is running
from the tap, while waiting for it to
grow hot. Otherwise, I am perfectly
still inside my breath, which I send out
into the world, which always comes back to me.
***
A Piano
To get here today I pulled leggings on,
and a dress, made oatmeal and coffee, cut fruit,
then walked back and forth before a book
bag in the living room into which I knotted two
amulets against suicide for someone I love—
a flat stone Karel drilled a hole into
before he died (having lived in the school
janitorial closet in lieu of a nice monastery cell
because of the communist government)
which I’d found escorting forty Czech children
up and down the coast of Spain, and a black round
of coral my ex-boyfriend’s mother had given
me after she lost her other son—and walked-run
to the bus with them and the gargantuan Norton
Anthology of American Literature Smaller 7th Edition
because I’m teaching Fitzgerald, and A Dream
of a Common Language because I couldn’t seem
to find my Audre Lorde and I wanted to send
her something beautiful and surviving, not
something that dwelt only on the pain, but
that explored a way out; someone who knew
(to kill oneself doesn’t require, though,
a disaster) what pain can do.
No books composed by suicides. No
Deborah Diggs, no Paul Celan. To
get here I walked to the bus stop planning how
and when to explain where babies come
from, for my child’s already asked…and I thought,
I’ll tell her in the summer,
for I’m a single mother.
To get here today I lined my eyes with dark sky,
filled in with moss green, and in the crease,
stone. In the street I realized my leggings
were on inside-out. I quartered a kiwi
and halved a passion fruit, for I love the feel
of infinity in the sandy crunch of seeds,
and the viscosity of the other’s jelly reminds
me of the frog egg clouds we used to find
as children in the pond in Texas. We’d slide
them into the claw-foot bathtub that sufficed
as a cow trough, caress them saying caviar,
by which we meant luck and money, the stars
that hung over the house in the dark,
and which I’ve not had in ages. Today I rode
the #56 bus down Derech Ha-shalom,
to Aluf Sade, and just past the stop
where the soldiers get off, I noticed someone
had painted the white wooden slats of his fence
black at even intervals, turning his
privacy into a piano again.
***
The editor suggested “correspondence” as the title
of a piece I was writing with my friend while our countries warred;
though the elegance appealed,
I didn’t like the agree, conform
definition that predates communicating via letters.
Were I asked again, I’d have agreed
to correspond—there was, after all, more
we agreed on
than not: That her side’s
missiles were wildly inaccurate; my
side’s were more precise, and that we both lived
in buildings no sane person would waste a bomb on unless
they were landlords. (My building’s exterior holes
are plugged with plastic soda bottles. I’m not sure why,
but they magnify the swallows wings) (and I
live in the fancy part) So we agree, it’s safer to be
bombed by our side, but for daily life, which was most
of the time, it was better to be us, for only
assholes would tear-gas her campus.
And that baking was a wonderful thing to do
—the bombs don’t make cake fall if it’s almond flour.
And that it sounds exactly like the word: boom-
boom, from the chest of earth, and
politics were for the evil. I said
Conversation. I love the con—–
the converse—–the versation—–
the living together, having dealings;
the talking part only came later, 1575
or so. We discovered we could phone
each other, without any documentation, just like that
—our voices didn’t believe at first—without
a roaming charge even. This was probably wishful. It’s old
French. And no one can see very clearly
through barbed wire lines that catch and stretch
everything like soap bubbles:
inside-out and back—all that spin.
When we
close our eyes and push. It’s so difficult to walk here without
stepping on a cliche, or in the ruts
of heavy tropes, for once the argument was fresh and wet. Yet
everything. I do feels framed as in the second day
of bombing: I took my girl in the rain to school
on my bike, in my melon-colored rain
coat, wet hair flying, and a hidden photographer shot me.
I said stop. I dismounted and went right
up into his face. What, I asked, would this frame demonstrate.
What would it prove and to whom and why and who
determined
its borders?