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Praise for Bewildered Physical Spaces

The body is never singular in Jenny Drai’s lyric essays. The body is at once��archive, myth, specimen, and speaking subject. In the book’s prologue, the��narrator returns to a childhood fixation on the preserved bog body known��as the Windeby Girl. What begins as memory opens into a layered act of��ventriloquy, addressing both the speaker’s younger self and the unearthed��figure across time. The voice slips between them, enacting a kind of��temporal possession: “You grow up in the cadaver of this girl… You lay your��childhood in the bog.” Here, the ancient body becomes a charged site of��projection and identification, a place where memory, sexuality, and shame��may be recalled and deposited.

The “bewildered” of Drai’s title returns the word to its root: to be bewildered is to be led into the wild and enter a space without clear markers.��
In Drai’s work, bewilderment is a condition of immersion: an exposure��
to the unruly terrains of body, history, and voice. The wilderness here is��
psychic as much as physical: an interior thicket where identities shift and��
narratives double back. Formally restless, Drai’s texts move among essayistic��inquiry, documentary fragments, lyric eruptions, and diaristic confession.

~ Eva Heisler

What draws me to Bewildered Physical Spaces has to do with the meeting��of the rivers of indeterminacy, linguistic history, and the re-humaning of��historical figures. From the Windeby Girl to Joan of Arc, to mermaids, to��Saint Barbara, to Old English-descended poetry, the reader swirls through��hybridity of form and narrative voice, the speakers changing and changeling.��Personal story is threaded throughout as to remind the reader of archetype,��its questioning and thwarting, as framework for living.

~Rajiv Mohabir

Hybrid
Paperback, 99 pages
ISBN: 979-8-9957783-0-1
2026