It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him

in history, the one that counts
the progress of time as seismic

shifts, as the partitioning of before
and after, as if history unfurls

a taut chain that surveys the distance
from one point on the landscape

to the boundary of another
while everything else falls to the side

like small pebbles along a rock-face
bound to nothing but the abyss

of unrecorded intimacies, dark and spacious
as those tunnels the imagination builds

from pools of ink. My father leans
over a page, his brown hand

bound to the binding of a book
and the book a white fog from which

steps forth a man wandering alone
along a country path and walking, walking

all day long the endless length of a field
in search of what the resistance of a wind alone

could teach him—the type of man who,
possessed by vagrant passions, becomes the man

he reads about in a book, and so is also
my father standing up from a twin cot

in a small room with an even smaller suitcase
and wandering into a field he walks all day long

against a wind that smells of the Welsh sea
until weak-kneed and parched with thirst

he stops for water in a churchyard.
This is before I am a point of view

in history, before he becomes a household
bound, like any man, to that war between

self-clouding sorrow and vague ambition.
It is the month of Chaitra. The beginning

of a new year. Everywhere in the field
fluttering around him, nameless as the impulse

that first led him here, the bright and strange
crowd of yellow flowers called daffodils.
from the journal THE THREEPENNY REVIEW
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The poem describes an incident related to me by my father, though he could not recollect the precise book he was reading at the time. I have, in lieu of this gap in his memory, embedded intertextual references to another famous walk taken through the English countryside by Dorothy and William Wordsworth and later recounted in “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”

Supritha Rajan on "My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field"
Formal color headshot of Olivia Muenz
"'Those Cloudy Infinite Iterations of Self': An Interview with Olivia Muenz"

"Written at the end of the author’s months-long period of being bedridden, I Feel Fine replicates her neurodivergence at the sentence-level, operating primarily through fragments and association rather than linear thought. Fundamentally playful, it layers and flattens experiences, calling out to an ever-shifting and multiple you."

viaMICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
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Cover image of Evie Shockley's book, Suddenly We
What Sparks Poetry:
Evie Shockley on Language as Form

"I found this truism (which seems to readily reproduce itself: 'one sin begets another,' 'one tragedy begets another,' 'one wedding begets another') bubbling up in my brain. If only one vote begat another in that inevitable way, I sighed, thinking of how hard it was to get women’s right to vote established as the law of the land—and of how long it was after that before Black women were able to exercise their 'women’s rights.'"
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