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by MacKenzie Polonyi (Author)
Raised in a household of paprika in New Jersey by her homesick maternal grandmother--a refugee of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and ensuing refugee crisis--Mackenzie necessarily explores prescribed responsibilities of diasporic only daughterhood. While shepherding her beloved grandmother through hospice at home, Mackenzie wanders into slippery and informative familial-folkloric reveriescapes by way of amuletic diacritical vowels, gathering cartographic knowledge from her grandmother's body, name, language, personal possessions, and stories. Mackenzie desperately records her grandmother's waning memories cratered by suicide, occupation, revolution, forced exodus, homesickness, and progressive dementia, while simultaneously condemning violent political conditions and interrogating intergenerational psychoemotional curses and ethics of witnessing. What do we give each other?
A phantasmagorical train station--shared and frequented by generations of living and deceased women relatives with pervasive medical histories of autoimmunity--materializes for her dreamlike peregrinations, tender questions, vulnerable unsnarlings, and spectral cycle-breaking communions. In Post-Volcanic Folk Tales, Mackenzie is devoted yet vitally disobedient, her world-breaking-and-building is both factual and folkloric. Here, Mackenzie practices her ancestral language of horses, reflects upon imperfections of remembrance, demonstrates violences of national victimhood, and troubles perceptions and illusions of death, time, and belonging. Here, she reconceptualizes guardian angels, explores complexities of "matriviticultural" psychoemotional inheritance and familial illness, and ultimately archives, grieves, and names her rage by way of imaginative invention.
