[06.22.22]
Deeply grateful to have my lyric essay, “Kinutil,” included in The Margins‘ special notebook on wine, edited by the poet Madeleine Mori. The piece is dedicated to the women of my mother’s hometown, and the generational memory they carry with them in the many ways they nurture and labor and love.
Introducing the folio, Mori writes:
“Lyrical writing provides a kind of alchemical prolonging of life to its subject, as wine provides to fruit or grain. Both act as living vessels of the history, memory, and care that their makers put in, and that we, as readers and drinkers, simultaneously filter through our own personal histories and sense memories. The body and the bottle—we siphon off substances and place them inside, hopefully to compound and synthesize, with the intention of pouring them out on a later date, on a night marked by safety and communion when what has long been stored, growing luxurious or cloudy or wild, is reintroduced to the bald truth of oxygen.
Intoxication, with its dangers and allure, is magnetic—how it can alter our perceptions about ourselves, our relationships, our values and worth, and its propensity therein to reveal the structures of power at play. In this special notebook on the theme of Wine, thirteen writers add remarkable texture to the lyric landscape of perception.”
Jen Mutia Eusebio 