Dhaka-born, NYC-bred & Berlin-based freelance writer and poet. Organizing team member of akimbo, former organizer of Berlin Spoken Word. Influencer Marketing and Community Manager at Chaos. For wage labor, I’ve been a content/article writer, copywriter, communications specialist, and SEO-based technical writer. For inquiries or CV, write me: mreza.nyc@gmail.com.
Photo by Van Wilhoite
“Marina’s work often looks into moments of misidentified or misdirected desire. It yearns for a moment of connection and suddenly ends up saying ‘this is my stop, i'm getting off.’ Sometimes the poems let themselves be, and sometimes they thwart or defeat their own wants. ‘it's hard not to turn on myself i turn so hard i'm twirling.’
But, the poems never stop striving. There’s a persistence and drive to Marina’s work. ‘fuck you, god is a prayer’ — I alternate between hearing ‘fuck you, god is a prayer’ and ‘fuck you, god is a prayer.’ Both seem to work in the world of that poem. There's a depth of wanting in it that’s fathomless. The speaker of the poem seems to feel that everything and nothing is divine, and this is quite a bone to pick with god. How do you get through the day with the vacuum cleaner reminding you that your feet deserve holiness too? Prayer. How do you keep god in the bedroom as well as everywhere else, all the time? Perpetual prayer, or maybe the expansion of prayer into all speech. Prayer like seasoning. Prayer like breath. A prayer made so mundane that it feels okay to say it to begin with, like: ‘purgatory of prayer & aimlessness once all vices are exhausted prayer for other highs, like a word defamiliarized.’
Throughout Marina’s poems, the speaker seeks softness in a reality of sharpness. Sometimes there’s humor intertwined in this tension, sometimes pain, but most of the time — both. The body wants what it wants. The brain wants what it wants. And the beauty of her work is often that this is treated as totally okay, and made very normal, even if it deals in some level of taboo. The poems speak the body into reality, even though we live in a world that often tries to relegate us entirely into the realm of the mind. ‘holy breasts holy butt sneeze.’ The body can be a metaphor, or it can just be what it is. ‘literally no one cares that picking scabs doesn’t have to be a metaphor / that you can seek a fluffy landing’…. that you can seek a fluffy landing feels like the poem tattling on itself. It seems to be saying that it’s okay to just be good enough. Perfection is a trap, and it doesn’t promise not to break your ankles. The poem loves itself in this moment of softness and acceptance, and loves both the speaker and audience too.
Marina’s work…must deal with the other side of desire as well. ‘Do we love on each other harder? / In the absence of those once dear?’ Absence and the times between pleasures, or pursuits of pleasure, ring through the work. Sometimes the absence is a lost loved one. Sometimes it’s just reality’s harshness prevailing for the moment. Or the severe consequences of pleasure gone awry for too long. ‘That god is dealing drugs / Behind 7/11.’
But the triumph of Marina’s work is that it never loses its joy completely. It pushes through. With butterscotch ice cream and discount golden kiwis abound. Each surprise turn of the poem, each weird-ass juxtaposition wins the day, brings every passing second into its full uniqueness. There’s an attention to detail that promises that if we pay enough attention, all days that we get to live in will be different and full and strange and sad and joyful.“ - Crista Siglin, excerpt from essay read at Akimbo (“What is an essay? How can it live?”)
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Grateful for these luminaries with whom I’ve had the privilege to study & learn from: Kaveh Akbar, Julia Cameron, Clifford Chase, Carl Clancy, Caroline Clifford, Lisa Cohen, Farnoosh Fathi, Matthew Garrett, Michele Guido, Krystall Languell, Ed Lin, John Loughery, Anneke Lucas, Douglas Martin, Ben Mauk, Rusty, sam sax, Christine Schutt, Emily Sernaker, Crista Siglin, Joanna Valente, Deb Olin Unferth, Bradley Whitehurst and Elizabeth Willis
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Alumna at the following institutions:
Prep for Prep (Contingent XXV) & The Nightingale-Bamford School (2009)
Bachelor’s degree in English (Creative Writing) with a certificate in South Asian Studies from Wesleyan University (2013)
Completed a 200-hour yoga teacher training with The Giving Tree (2015) & a trauma-conscious yoga training with Liberation Prison Yoga (2018)