MEMORY OF A LARGER MIND
Poems written with glaciers, an elegy and a love song for a world moving from ice to water to light.
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These luminous poems were written outdoors, in the presence of glaciers, composed with shifting light, wind, sound, and scent, alive to our current moment while keeping one foot in geologic time. They're elegies and love songs, celebrations and laments. As the world moves from ice to water, the poems move too: cycling through grief, love, and joy, asking how to withstand and how to transform.
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At the heart of this work is memory — planetary, cultural, familial, and personal. It's part of a larger project exploring "sacrifice zones": clear-cuts, concentration camps, dying glaciers. In these places of layered loss, the poet gathers flowers, rocks, waters, and bones, then transmutes them into pigments for her visual art, and into language for her writing. The result is work in which all bodies are understood as dynamic, always becoming; in which difficult pasts may open toward more peaceful futures; and in which grief, handled with care, might shift into love.
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Read an excerpt in Poetry Northwest​​​​​​​​
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COMING OCTOBER 2026 FROM OMNIDAWN
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ADVANCE PRAISE
In these keening poems, Daniela Naomi Molnar seeks solace in glaciers, and the ice responds. A stern but patient tutor, ice illuminates a cerulean path through grief. It is a lens for seeing ourselves in proper perspective, a prism that reveals the full spectrum of human experience. Glaciers remind us that ‘the only promise... time makes is to be ongoing’.
Marcia Bjornerud, professor of geosciences (Lawrence University), author of Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks
In the Jewish tradition, the kaddish, the mourning prayer, is simultaneously a song of praise for the unutterable, for that which is beyond all language, all praise. Here too Daniela Naomi Molnar has written a kaddish for our moment, for a glacier lost to melting, for ancestors known and unknown, that is simultaneously an exaltation for all that changes and in changing lives on: ‘let the pre-name turn to name / then let the name turn nameless.’ With incredible precision of syllable and sound, of rhythm and movement, these poems of astounding beauty beseech us to attend to the earth’s own memory, which is our own memory, for as these poems know, we are not other than the earth with which we live. ‘Become an apprentice to the immaterial.’ Amen.
Julie Carr, author of The Garden
Is a glacier a memory? Is it time? An echo of the past? In Daniela Naomi Molnar’s Memory of a Larger Mind, the glacier is an incantation, a kaddish, something both primordial and fixed, a thing so sentient it is at our mercy. Molnar brings us to the ice and embodies the lyric with a vision and clarity that comes only from grief. She asks us, “When a memory goes / what flows into its gap?” Here, Molnar is thinking as much about inheritance as the nature left behind, the ways that time and its bodies are at once an “insouciant menace” and a shared gossamer thing. There is a feeling in Molnar’s poetry of a ruptured deity captured in the calving of ice, hope transmitted through witness, and a millennia-deep ache for that which has always already moved through ice and stone. Memory of a Larger Mind is an astonishing collection of poems, one of the best books I’ve read in years. It will take your breath away in its insistences and urgencies.
Natalie Eilbert, author of Overland
Like a glacier, Daniela Naomi Molnar’s poems carve and clarify their readers. This book of poems asks us to slow with its hefty task – to untame the distance between remembering and forgetting, to feral our future ghosts. Daniela excavates indifference with muscular language, investigative silence, and undiluted sentience, offering us opportunities to remember the global body with our own. Unshrinking from the onslaught of erosion, erasure, and amnesia, each poem annunciates what endures after we, and the world, are broken. Daniela shows us that all grief cuts towards a bedrock of love.
Nina Elder, artist​​​​​