Dauerwunder

Carolina Ebeid’s Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts is distinguished in its sincere and unbroken attention toward the logistics of experience:

how do you know you are remembering
an event or remembering the pictures of
an event, do your dream in the first or
third person?

The chapbook quotes Simone Weil to remind that such exacting attention can be synonymous with prayer. In the epistolary opening poem, the speaker describes using Google Translate to hear Arabic words aloud when a glitch causes all previous searches to be uttered at once, “a sudden market place of voices.” Sensing life in this sounded place and, wondering where “the ancestors gather,” she asks: “Can we say they find a slit or tear in the digital universe to speak through to us?”

Though a “record,” the text’s impulse is not to report the glitch or its mechanisms as incident, but to enter into and speak from that glitch. Between words’ messages (“appall v. to grow pale / pall n. perhaps from pellis (skin)”) and wordlessness’s possibilities (“emerge the _________ out of the _________”), the speaker listens to overlapping voices, tries to write “on my phone with voice-to-text,” and wonders repeatedly about “the telepathy machine” (“telepathy, yelling over the sea / machines, their quarrel, quarrel”).

There are sometimes ghosts in the machine, a term Toni Morrison popularized in discussing unrecognized ways Black people and culture shaped US literature, and which Gilbert Ryle first used to critique Descartes’s notion that mind and body are separate. Ebeid both acknowledges what the record hides—“put yr phone in the air vids of the body wrapped in cloth under flowers Shireen Abu Akleh over shoulders repetitiousness of corpses”—and attends to the body’s mindful protests (“unfair to be a body to have a name be locatable”). “How much of my mother’s skin / in micro particles remains on her / necklace I’m wearing,” asks the poem, before declaring: “If you have skin, then you have nerve cell memories, registrars of information.” The handmade volume from Brian Teare’s Albion Books is uniquely sized and covered, a container that holds prayer wholly, the book’s body a physical pall that protects its interior.