In her foreword to Awayward, National Book Award-winning poet Jean Valentine writes, "Jennifer Kronovet's poems in Awayward are so surprising and compelling and beautiful, so intelligent and felt. Kronovet uses simple words and works at a mysterious depth, one we can enter with gladness."

Written while Kronovet was living in Beijing, Awayward illuminates the sense of disconnect that travelers experience when their major touchstones of language and geography are altered. These poems wander the world, drifting in and out of conversations that are alternately...

A collection of language-driven, imaginative poetry from the winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series Open Competition.

Jennifer Kronovet's poetry is inflected by her fraught, ecstatic relationship with language--sentences, words, phonemes, punctuation--and how meaning is both gained and lost in the process of communicating. Having lived all over the world, both using her native tongue and finding it impossible to use, Kronovet approaches poems as tactile, foreign objects, as well as intimate, close utterances.

In The Wug Test, named for a method by which a linguist...