Contenu
A collection of language-driven, innovative poetry from the winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series competition.
Instructions for mourning a dead language, fires caused by words, a boy who grows up alone in a forest, a lesson in “English Female Speech”: these are some of the subjects explored in Jennifer Kronovet’s The Wug Test, a book of poems that goes inside the essential questions of language. How does language shape the way you think? How would you invent the perfect language? How does language blind you?
The Wug Test performs these questions and their answers, combining lyric facts with a scientific imagination. Rooted in linguistics and in the experience of seeing language grow up inside a child, the poems evoke the frightening and potent space before speech, revealing the ways language uses us.