The Rattle Egg by Terri Witek

“Is the egg obvious? Witek’s visual text candles language in this volume of discovery, overjoyed and overwhelmed by the maps that link body and vocabulary through egg and ova. Behind this text is a poet with two mother tongues, playing between Portuguese and English with skill and beauty—yoking words. These poems know that hatchlings imprint on their caretaker, but the tether is mutual. Just as the ovum, and the fetus it later becomes, leaves behind its trace in the body as dna not the parent’s own. We are thus connected to our little eggs much like the thread with a needle on each end in Witek’s text: pierced and sutured in perpetual equipoise. With beauty and humor, bravery and brio, this book illuminates hidden connections. Bravo!”

–Amaranth Borsuk

In The Rattle Egg, Terri Witek addresses the egg of Clarice Lispector’s story “The Egg and the Chicken” as a gender/genre of primal oddity. As a “terrain of foundational impressions, “the geometry of eggness” is both intimate and comically vast: the suspended egg, the performative egg, the baby rattle. What of the consumable egg-in-a-carton, cushioned in a cardboard grid, or the egghead with her sheets of graph paper seeking formulas for brokenness? With multiple visual and verbal recombinations, Witek wonders if the egg writes back.  Herein the delight! What does it mean to be responsible and tender to the absurd worlds outside you and also in you, “the smeared gold apostrophe”?

–Vidhu Aggarwal