In Post-Volcanic Folk Tales, Mackenzie Polonyi explores what it means to be an unfluent daughter of Hungarian diaspora, far away from a country called home since birth. Raised by her maternal grandmother-a refugee of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and ensuing refugee crisis-Mackenzie coos into the acoustic wound of a geographical linguistic in-between while troubling perceptions of death and time and memory, worming herself into folkloric-familial spaces by way of vowels and diacritics, and gathering cartographic information from her beloved grandmother's body, name, belongings, and stories while shepherding her through hospice.
In her debut collection, Mackenzie is disobedient and devoted, her world-building is factual and folkloric. Here, she reconceptualizes guardian angels, reclaims her ancestral language of horses, reflects upon imperfections of remembrance, demonstrates violences of victimhood, explores complexities of "matriviticultural" psychoemotional inheritance and familial illness, and ultimately, archives and grieves by way of imaginative invention.
