92 pages, August 2021,  $15.95
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 15th March 2020

The world is turning,
we reluctantly spin with
it, dizzy and weak.

We cling to the next day,
the next curve winds up slowly,
the blackbirds in spring.

What we know not is
now. Now is not what we know.
Yet spring, yet flowers,

yet night, yet dreaming.
Cover photograph: Magda Kapa
Drawings: Elizabeth Adams

Our newest title!
Losing Touch
by Magda Kapa
with illustrations by Elizabeth Adams

"These brief apparently simple poems are beautifully clear distillations of the sense of obligatory isolation in its various aspects. Between dream and nightmare they provide a tiny crystalline stage across which ghosts of the moment may pass and converse."
George Szirtes, poet and translator, author of many books including Fresh Out of the Sky (Bloodaxe, 2021); winner of the T.S. Eliot prize for Reel

In Losing Touch we read a series of ten-line poems, written between March 2020 and the end of February 2021. They are about living during the pandemic, but they are not about the pandemic in a descriptive or overt sense. By regularly condensing her thoughts and emotions while also chronicling the passage of seasons and her own individual life, Magda Kapa has expressed with poignancy, sensitivity, and yes, even humor, what so many of us have experienced during this time. The book is illustrated with twelve ink drawings by Elizabeth Adams, most of which were done during the same period.

The author writes:

"Vague and opaque was the time when I began writing these poems in March 2020. A wave was in sight, a wave of disease none of us had seen or experienced before. It had rolled over other countries, but in denial and against all reason, we had hoped that it would not have the same impact on us it had had on others. Once in its mercy in February 2020, and watching the news from northern Italy, most of us were speechless and at a loss.

It took me some time to be able to put into words what I felt, saw, or imagined. Most often, words arose from the natural world around, or not so far from, my house. When I was finally able to visit my family in Greece for a few weeks, in the relatively less-tense summer, one can taste in the poems my relief and need for a break from grief.

The poems are ten-liners in a form invented by the poet George Szirtes: three stanzas in a kind of a haiku form, 5-7-5 syllables, and a last line of five syllables standing alone. Something in this form fitted the succession of waves, something in the orphan last line fitted the loneliness and distance we all felt.

As I am writing these words the pandemic is still not over and, in Germany, where I live, or in other countries like India, the third wave is at its peak, so it is maybe a bit inaccurate writing any sentence in a past tense about the year these poems were written. It is also not to expect that the pandemic will end on a certain predictable date in the future, at least not for all people, or for all countries at the same time."

"Through words, Magda Kapa has been carving a space where we all can sit and mourn those who were lost and the things that won't return, yet she also prepared a space to fill again with love and light, like a far cry of a blackbird in the night, announcing an unexpected arrival, and 'happiness/for every sound'."
Mariadonata Villa, poet and translator, author of Verso Fogland (Minerva, 2020) and L'assedio (Raffaelli, 2012)

Picture
Magda Kapa is a poet, photographer, and teacher who was born in Greece and now lives and teaches in northern Germany. Her poems, photos, and texts have been published in print and online magazines including Documentum Issue 2: Pictures & Words, Aster(ix) Journal, Zócalo Public Square, Tincture Journal, Saraba Magazine, and LensCulture. Her first poetry collection, All the Words, was also published by Phoenicia Publishing.