The Selkie by Morgan Võ

The Selkie, Morgan Võ’s fascinating and highly original debut, is organized into three linked sections, animated by jokes, confusion, existential horror, and banality, often revealing the gaps in understanding that tangle this string of vignettes. In an outdoor market, we meet an unlikely hero in The Monger, buying and selling fish from his stall while the poems around him touch on topics of racial capitalism, cultural ties to animals and food, dislocation, diaspora, and the impacts of the nuclear family. Also included are The Monger’s own written documents that propose a series of year-long performance pieces, each seemingly created to test and explore his specific individuality among a community of displaced histories. Võ investigates how the shadows of larger global issues link with our intimate and daily interactions, and The Selkie introduces an entirely unique voice within the landscape of contemporary American poetry.

Morgan Võ is a poet and librarian, and a current member of the Poetry Project Newsletter editorial collective. His poems have most recently appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Wyrm. Originally from coastal Virginia, he lives now in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The Selkie will be his first full-length book of poems.

(Cover image by Lena Takamori)

The Brooklyn Rail