The Wug Test: Poems

A collection of language-driven, imaginative poetry from the winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series Open Competition.

Jennifer Kronovet’s poetry is inflected by her fraught, ecstatic relationship with language—sentences, words, phonemes, punctuation—and how meaning is both gained and lost in the process of communicating. Having lived all over the world, both using her native tongue and finding it impossible to use, Kronovet approaches poems as tactile, foreign objects, as well as intimate, close utterances.

In The Wug Test, named for a method by which a linguist discovered how deeply imprinted the cognitive instinct toward acquiring language is in children, Kronovet questions whether words are objects we should escape from or embrace. Dispatches of text from that researcher, Walt Whitman, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the poet herself, among other voices, are mined for their futility as well as their beauty, in poems that are technically revealing and purely pleasurable. Throughout, a boy learns how to name and ask for those things that makes up his world.

How does a mind build a world from words?

• Linguistics and Poetry: A unique fusion where the science of language meets the art of the poem, drawing on the work of Chomsky, Saussure, and others.
• Language Acquisition: Follow a mother and son’s journey as a child’s first words illuminate one of poetry’s deepest subjects: how we learn to speak.
• Philosophy of Language: Tackles the essential question of whether words are tools to embrace or traps to escape, explored through intimate and technically revealing verse.
• Translation and Yiddish: Explores how meaning shifts across cultures and tongues, delving into the untranslatable and the rich idioms of a heritage language.