Daniela Naomi Molnar — poet and artist

Distributed by University of Chicago Press

Poetry · Debut collection

Debut collection. Poems that incorporate multiple voices to embrace fragmentation, discord, and plurality. At a time of simultaneous isolation and interconnection, this book is an inquiry into the edges of the self. Moving between a remote canyon in New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, New York City, the virtual world, the past, and the unstable future, the poet asks, "Whose afterimage am I?" Sprawling, celebratory, and mourning, this chorus of voices encompasses violence, love, empathy, fear, a burning planet, a pandemic, heartbreak, desire, joy, and grief.

Chorus was written largely during the COVID-19 pandemic, in conditions of enforced separation that sharpened the book's central questions about self and community, connection and isolation. It is a pandemic book without being only about the pandemic — the convergence of personal and planetary crisis it documents opened onto something larger.

Chorus is the beginning of what became Memory of a Larger Mind. The inquiry into inherited grief, the movement between specific landscapes and their histories, and the attention to the nonhuman world as both subject and co-author — all of these threads continue in that project and in the books that followed. In retrospect, Chorus is where the questions that animate the whole body of work first became visible.

Publisher

Omnidawn

Publication Date

2023

Praise

“CHORUS is a lyric wail stunned into awakening by crises both planetary and personal — though here, as in the physical universe, the two are not oppositional phenomena. Pieces made of fragmented verse, sinuous prose, and desperate frenzied plea make a rhetoric of salve, or salvation. As the poet writes, ‘The songbird is and is not a metaphor. / The songbird is and is not gone.’ What I mean to say to you (I meaning me, you meaning absolutely you, the one reading this) is that this is a book that speaks from a body and to a body. I felt spoken to. Known. ‘Are you there. Is anyone there.’”

Kazim Ali

Judge, Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Contest

"Tendrilic, electric, Daniela Naomi Molnar's CHORUS traces a mind in swift action. A near daybook, this collection is intimate and expansive, born of the solitudes highlighted in the pandemic, while resistant to the individualisms thrust upon us. It is a choral undertaking that points to the ecosystems of our languages, the subterranean connections between our lives and the world, and the 'open portals' of books in our current fires. A stunning book by a poet I am excited to follow."

Solmaz Sharif

Author of *Customs*

"CHORUS beautifully embodies the ancient function of its title: an 'I' gathers to speak communally, to and of the crux in which we find ourselves. Locating luminous detail amidst the disaster, these poems are portals open to the personal, the collective, the playful, and the innovative, offering us language's capacity to bring us to our senses."

Eleni Sikelianos

Oregon Book Award judge · Author of *Make Yourself Happy*