Post-Volcanic Folk Tales

Raised in a household of paprika in New Jersey by her homesick maternal grandmother—a refugee of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and ensuing refugee crisis—Polonyi necessarily explores prescribed responsibilities of diasporic only-daughterhood. While shepherding her beloved grandmother through hospice at home, Polonyi wanders into slippery and informative familial-folkloric reveriescapes, gathering cartographic knowledge from her grandmother’s body, name, language, personal possessions, and stories. In a “fever of the figurative” she desperately records the residues of her grandmother’s waning memories while condemning violent political conditions, interrogating intergenerational psychoemotional curses, and contemplating ethics of witnessing. What do we give each other? How do we metabolize what we inherit for healing?

In Post-Volcanic Folk Tales, Polonyi’s world-breaking-and-building propels dreamlike peregrinations, tender questions, vulnerable unsnarlings, and spectral cycle-stopping communions. Devoted yet vitally disobedient, she sings, archives, grieves, names her rage, and remedies “across endless loss and regeneration.”