Always Coming Back: The Millions Interviews Marcela Sulak
Marcela Sulak is a conjurer of dazzling words and images. In her work, seasons swirl, thoughts cascade, and memories morph through the here and now. An accomplished poet, literary translator, podcast host and lecturer, Sulak has written three full length poetry collections and one chapbook; a lyric memoir; and has also translated several books from Hebrew, Czech, and French. In “Shekhinah,” the first poem in her latest collection, City of Skypapers, she writes, “I am alive today” —and the rest of the book is testimony to the vibrant world Sulak inhabits, to the microscopic vicissitudes that are both particular to her and yet familiar to readers, wherever they live. She lives “in a place where the flowers are old enough to have stories,” and it is these stories, often hidden under the surface, that she shares with us: freshly picked almonds and olivesbecome silk between the fingers; and radio waves “rest as lightly on our heads as air stirred / by a hand moving from a blessing.”
Sulak is Associate Professor at the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University in Israel, where I studied talked to her about rivers, runners, and the narrative paths we take.
