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. Resnikoff's 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 author's 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 Resnikoff's 'Unnatural Bird Migrator' ignites immediacy. It cast spells. Indeed one's 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. Resnikoff's '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
Ariel Resnikoff is a poet, scholar, translator, editor and educator. His most recent works include the chapbooks 'Ten-Four: Poems, Translations, Variations' (The Operating System, 2015), with Jerome Rothenberg, and 'Between Shades' (Materialist Press, 2014). His writing has been translated into Russian, French, Spanish and German, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Jacket2, Golden Handcuffs Review, Full Stop Quarterly, Tinge Magazine, The Wolf Magazine for Poetry and Schreibheft, Zeitschrift für Literatur. With Stephen Ross, he is at work on the first critical bilingual edition of Mikhl Likht's modernist Yiddish long poem, 'Processions, ' and with Lilach Lachman and Gabriel Levin, he is translating into English the collected writings of the translingual-Hebrew poet, Avot Yeshurun. Ariel is a reviews editor at Jacket2 and a founding editor of the journal and print-archive Supplement, co-published by the Materialist Press, Kelly Writers House and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught courses on multilingual diasporic literatures at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (UPenn) and at BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change. In 2019, he completed his PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation entitled 'Home Tongue Earthquake: The Radical Afterlives of Yiddishland, and he is currently a Posen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Secular Jewish Poetics and Pedagogy. Ariel lives on Alameda Island in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, the artist and landscape architect, Rivka Weinstock. 'Unnatural Bird Migrator, ' (The Operating System, 2020) which the poet Jake Marmer has described as "deep Ashkenazi Voodoo" is his first full-length poetry collection.
