A book of curses, Oracular Maladies summons an ecstatic performance of divas arriving in glamorous form. The backdrop: Vietnamese tonality, displacement, and reclamation. Cicadas arrive onstage. Cows arrive onstage. An odyssey of someone walking on her knees across an entire country makes a video onstage. This is Terazawa's third poetry collection, a wonder of light upon diacritic marks, layers of breathless music uneasy with its hybrid nature.

Contemplating fraught intersections between a mother's language of Vietnamese and craft considerations of Japanese-English meter, Oracular Maladies forms a series of six spoken "scores" mirroring the tonal arc of a musical variety show familiar to the Vietnamese diaspora, "Paris by Night." These poems are like a VHS box set dusted off for the first time after decades. Projective verse and prayers flash across the page. The melodrama receives respect.

Sophia Terazawa is the author of the novel, Tetra Nova (Deep Vellum, US; the87press,
UK/Ireland) and two poetry collections, Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum) and Anon (Deep
Vellum), along with chapbooks, I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press) and Correspondent
Medley (Factory Hollow Press), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize.

"The best poets not only speak, they look and they listen. I am here for all of it from Sophia Terazawa: 'If you must know our language, / there's a field some call a garden.' Everything is at play in this collection, an inventiveness with form and language that is both redemptive and devastating (smoke goes everywhere beauty destroys') Oracular Maladies is a translation of a translation, a performance, and a time machine. And isn't that really, what grief, exile, family, tradition, and culture is?" — Keith S. Wilson