Unnatural Bird Migrator

Unnatural Bird Migrator stitches together disparate filaments of diasporic language as a living quilt of translational refuse a patchwork-art gleaned and assembled from the pieces of writing and speech we are quite literally taught to forget. UNBM traverses the semi-permeable borders between doubling and tripling mother tongues in exile looping these languages through one another and back again in the form of a highly adaptive poetic boomerang that returns from the other side of the linguistic threshold already changed. This translinguistic praxis explores writing as a mode of perpetual displacement translating language in wide spirals outward to the farthest edges of the sonic/semantic divide while gleaning materials for a poetics from even the minutest residues left behind. Resnikoffs compositional method engages by (mis)translation in/to​ Yiddish- Hebrew- Aramaic- and Akkadian- adapted​ sonic/semantic properties in​ grammar syntax and lexicon taking English as its temporary host while performing perpetual inflectional slippages-interlingual punning and fusion-slangs-as much as the host can absorb. The dybbuk (Yiddish: spirit-possessor) which the authors Jewish-Ashkenazi ancestors believed to inhabit the body of the wild stutterer mad person heretic or akher [lit. other] becomes the peripheral focus​ of this poetry as Resnikoff reimagines the ways in which such a possession by language itself might manifest in the ​odd practices of the poet translator and Jew. The word odd here functions in deliberate echo of the terms against which Sabbatean stigma was first transcribed in 17th-century Palestine: for the odd practices of a false messiah.Ariel Resnikoffs Unnatural Bird Migrator ignites immediacy. It cast spells. Indeed ones cells feel subsumed by primordial realia having nothing in common with the plagiarized density that purports to signify experience reduced as it is to secular equation by lucre. Resnikoffs UNBM roams via the telepathy of wonder. As readers we begin to gather experience that articulates a plane suffused by magnificence by the voice of the uncanny. This being language that allows us to crystallize fever to excavate hunches via the mathematics of power. -Will Alexander