Margo Fuchs-Knill
To Day: Editor's Introduction
Editor’s Introduction, by Elizabeth Gordon McKim
Margo Fuchs-Knill’s voice is particular: a Swiss writer immersed in the stew of American English. She knows what it means to be abandoned at school age by the mother-tongue she moves in, to be hungry for something she has not yet tasted but remembers from some other displacement. She possesses the serious playfulness of a poet, seeing and fielding words within worlds, uncovering odd nests of order in the inescapable present mess, and leaping deftly back and forth, into and out of the realms of the body’s imagination.
What’s a life worth living?
Honey on longing’s sidewalk
Add a zest of pepper
knowing that even bitter almonds
turn into the sweetest marzipan
Margo Fuchs-Knill’s second collection To Day moves brightly with an original Swiss-American voice and a distinctive American-Swiss pitch. The book is soaked with a sense of things moving in the calm and urgency of her experience. Most of the poems contain a running discourse on the nature of time and how we choose to live in it, through it, and despite it. Her words are flavored with the taste of savored moments, steeped in the scent of remembrance, and simmered slowly in the juices of the wild word quest, taking her listeners into familiar sanctuaries and far-flung structures at the edge of future sentences.
yet today one became entangled
in my aged long maiden braid
and the breeze from a green kiss was enough
to let the not-yet through
Margo Fuchs-Knill’s essays in To Day on language and poetics are ready with humor and humanity, political, philosophical and psychological insights and everyday trials; she often invites her listeners to laugh quietly at the absurd human imprint at the core of language and life. At the moment that she experiences the transitory arc of longing, she is enthralled by the fully sustained moment, mischievously transformed into wordsnacks she nibbles on the run.
If forgiveness has a color, it must be the color of the dove of peace.
Elizabeth Gordon McKim
Editor and Poet
Author of The Red Thread
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