![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Tracy-Fuad_c_Mak_1-scaled.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Photo Credit: Makar Artemev<\/p>\n
Upon arriving in a country where you don\u2019t speak the language, life takes on a dreamlike quality. The sounds and smells are new, the sun rises and sets at different intervals. Utterances, letters and their arrangements don\u2019t unfurl into meaning. The experience is enthralling and disorienting. It can also be deeply lonely, drawing into sharp relief the degree to which our experience is mediated by what we know \u2013 how relocating ourselves dislocates any stable sense of self we might have.<\/p>\n
The French word \u00e9tranger means both \u2018foreigner\u2019 and \u2018stranger\u2019. So it\u2019s no wonder that poetry draws in those who grapple with the strangeness of living as an immigrant in Berlin: the longing for a language that can handle the fragmented nature of existence, the struggle to understand and be understood, searching under stones for the locus of meaning and just finding more stones. Yet in poetry, this process isn\u2019t the problem. It\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n
Tracy Fuad introduces readers and writers alike to poetry that troubles and emulsifies the experience of otherness. As a Berlin-based poet and teacher, she directs the Berlin Writer\u2019s Workshop and is the author of four volumes of poetry, including about: blank (2021) and Portal (2024).<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/IMG_0388-scaled.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Photo Credit: Tracy Fuad<\/p>\n
Fuad\u2019s work explores the pieces, both material and immaterial, of which we are made: the substance, the memories, the words we speak and how they land. Her poems are mercurial and haunting, suffused with a desire for oneness that equally embraces the fragment. They document transits and translations \u2013 physical, spacial, digital, planetary \u2013 as a kind of dispossession and remaking.<\/p>\n
Fuad\u2019s workshops are organised around a weekly theme. Students analyse a few poems that she\u2019s selected, then take turns workshopping their own. Though clearly a student of craft, Fuad doesn\u2019t favour arduous formal constraints, nor does she insist that poems need to \u2018make sense\u2019 in order to have an impact. Indeed, her poetry syllabus brandishes the Mary Ruefle quote: \u201cI believe that if a poem gives you pleasure, you have understood it.\u201d<\/p>\n
In person, Fuad is soft-spoken, at once hesitant and deliberate. She often pauses before talking, as if the stakes for getting the words right couldn\u2019t be higher. Having grown up in suburban Minneapolis, she came to Berlin after spending two years teaching English in Kurdistan, her father\u2019s homeland. \u201cI visited Kurdistan for the first time in 2009,\u201d she explains. \u201cBefore that, I hadn\u2019t really thought so much about my Kurdish ancestry, and I wasn\u2019t raised speaking Kurdish. Yet, I was always drawn to spend more time there and learn the language.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/IMG_2793.JPG-scaled.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Photo: Tracy Fuad<\/p>\n
After finishing her MFA at Rutgers University, she sold all her belongings and moved to a rural village not far from where her father once lived. \u201cI could see what my life would look like if I stayed in New York,\u201d she explains. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to stay because it was the easiest thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
The poems in about: blank draw heavily on Fuad\u2019s time in Kurdistan, tugging the threads of history, language and lineage until they begin to unravel. Translated fragments of Kurdish are juxtaposed with poetic musings and internet slang, becoming discursive fractals of interpretation. Grammatical constructions, such as the future perfect, become meditations on place and circumstance.<\/p>\n
Poets are often die-hard etymology fans. We believe that the origin of the word has something to tell us about what it denotes, that the traces of its origins still bear some sort of meaning.<\/p>\n
Much of this project is a longing to understand, both in a literal and a figurative sense. \u201cI\u2019ve spent considerable time and energy learning Kurdish and German,\u201d says Fuad. \u201cIt has highlighted for me how profound it is to struggle toward mutual understanding. I think that\u2019s part of the drive to write poetry: to try to articulate something that I find difficult to say.\u201d<\/p>\n
This drive toward understanding emboldens Fuad to approach language with both a microscope and a pickaxe, unearthing questions about the origin of things. Objects become vessels connecting us to history and its violence: 5,000-year-old archaeological shards found at Tell Sitak, buttons, flowers, gas canisters used in the Halabja Massacre of 1988 memorialised in a town square.<\/p>\n
Objects and words share a restless trajectory. In Fuad\u2019s poetry, even the word \u2018object\u2019 (Latin: \u2018to throw against\u2019) becomes a mechanism for reckoning with world-historical grief: \u201cI\u2019m looking to come to a compromise with my objects so we stop doing harm to one another\u2014 \/ But the stones here hum between wake and sleep, a soft ballad for home.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPoets are often die-hard etymology fans,\u201d explains Fuad. \u201cWe believe that the origin of the word has something to tell us about what it denotes, that the traces of its origins still bear some sort of meaning.\u201d But meaning is never static; it migrates, accumulates, transforms. This is particularly true in the digital age, when our objects and bodies are hurled and collapsed into flatness:<\/p>\n
minted with a cheerful palm
belonging only to the isle of depreciated objects
typing\u2026
it\u2019s December and the blades of grass have scissored up the heartache
so receipts must be everywhere waiting for rain
I hunger for the tender of the ping
my fly loves it when I\u2019m home
I say hi with a rolled book of songs
I dreamt in a new language, but couldn\u2019t understand it
\u2013 from \u2018The Pith of Every Language is a Rift\u2019<\/p>\n
Fuad\u2019s second collection, Portal, is like a treatise on the relationship between embodiment and disembodiment. Reading it, you feel as though you\u2019re entering someone else\u2019s dream. In a series of poems called \u2018Hyposubject\u2019, the voice moves up and out of the body. Fuad says that, in these poems, she was imagining what a non-human intelligence might say about her life.<\/p>\n
Berlin plays a starring role: its impromptu gatherings and lack of jobs, its feral apathy, its seemingly endless reminders of a severed and war-torn past. Fuad guides us through the city like a bewitched cartographer \u2013 out to picnics and into bathtubs, across stumbling stones and remnants of the Wall. This attentiveness is perhaps born of Fuad\u2019s sense of otherness: \u201cAn unfamiliar place feels like a container for history,\u201d she posits. \u201cPerhaps being non-German and not having grown up here exacerbates the degree to which I\u2019m confronted with the history here.\u201d<\/p>\n
The collection\u2019s first poem, \u2018Song\u2019, depicts scenes from an apartment in Berlin where the narrator experiences a suspended state of permeability: the sound of opera singers two floors up, slugs brutalising the beans in the garden, the social media account of an estranged lover, the residues of the past one treads upon each day. And then, the baby enters the poem:<\/p>\n
And the blighted beans
That I had planted
And the bricks
Laid into the street
Where the wall used to stand
Which I followed some mornings
As I walked alone
And the hands and feet
And the toes and fingers
Of my baby
As I saw them for the first time
And the singing\u2014
That all of this
Was mine
Although it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a sense in Fuad\u2019s poems of trying to hold onto a thing that is already slipping away. Even having a child isn\u2019t an experience of ownership, as it suggests, but that of something passing through you. \u201cYour children are not your children,\u201d writes the poet Kahlil Gibran. Instead, they are \u201clife\u2019s longing for itself\u201d. Perhaps the act of creation is really about the porousness between life and not-life, possession and loss. Portal\u2019s final poem, \u2018Birth\u2019, explodes this reality:<\/p>\n
You were born in a brutalist building
Rising above a long body of water.
The body, a bypass canal.
You were born beneath six beaming spotlights.
Born of a sharpness, and set to music.
In the backroom, on a tablet, through a portal.<\/p>\n
To have a child is a study in relinquishing control, and yet Fuad is grappling with something more transcendental: the extent to which we are integrated with our history, setting and those around us. \u201cOur Western sensibility ignores how much we\u2019re influenced by the people and environment around us,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve been reading about social ecology lately, which is one of the guiding principles of Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish region. Social ecology disputes the binary and hierarchical relationship between humans and the environment around them \u2013 it insists on the interconnectivity between humans and our environment. It\u2019s something that I feel we\u2019ve lost in our society completely.\u201d<\/p>\n
One way Fuad ritualises the practice of interconnectivity is through teaching. After finding a home at the Berlin Writer\u2019s Workshop as a teacher in 2021, she took over as director in 2024. \u201cWe\u2019re a group of about 20 teachers, all working writers from different backgrounds,\u201d she explains. \u201cWe offer workshops in English, but we also host meet-ups almost every month and organise readings. We tend to meet in teachers\u2019 homes or in bookstores, so there\u2019s a sort of intimate community that develops. And because it\u2019s outside of a formal institution, everyone is there for the love of writing.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/IMG_8863.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Photo Credit: Tracy Fuad<\/p>\n
Lately, it\u2019s easy to be reminded of the malleability of truth, how agreeing on a coherent reality is no longer a given. So what does it mean for Fuad, in this historical moment, to sit in a room with a group of poets and ponder the weight of a poem? \u201cFor me, it actually feels like an act of resistance,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m not so interested in the poem itself as a site of resistance, or as a political tool, but I think the poetic mode of observing changes the relationship between us and the world around us. It\u2019s a different mode of relation, and I think it brings us in deeper contact with the real.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not so interested in the poem itself as a site of resistance, or as a political tool, but I think the poetic mode of observing changes the relationship between us and the world around us. <\/p>\n
\u201cAt the heart of poetry,\u201d she adds, \u201cis not the poem-as-product, but the poetic mode or poetic state. I\u2019m working on an essay about the power of this poetic mode to bring us into a deeper and more authentic engagement with the world around us, not just as an observer in a subject-object relationship, but something more nuanced, less hierarchical, moving more toward an interconnectivity. I think this might be important or even essential in the present political context.\u201d<\/p>\n
The poet Adrienne Rich called poetry \u201cthe liquid voice that can wear through stone\u201d. Perhaps, instead of always turning over stones looking for answers, we would each do well to find a voice that can wear through them. Or, better yet, to get quiet and listen to what they have to say.<\/p>\n
Follow Tracy Fuad at @trace_of_tracy and the Berlin Writer\u2019s Workshop at @writeberlin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo Credit: Makar Artemev Upon arriving in a country where you don\u2019t speak the language, life takes on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[99],"tags":[112,3931,2059,190,26078,9161,26079],"class_list":["post-45874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-berlin","tag-books","tag-culture","tag-germany","tag-literature-readings","tag-poetry","tag-writing"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116274577198982749","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}