Drai, Jenny - Bewildered Physical Spaces

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