Unnatural Bird Migrator

Unnatural Bird Migrator  stitches together disparate filaments of diasporic language as a living quilt of translational refuse, a patchwork-art gleaned and assembled from the pieces of writing and speech we are quite literally taught to forget. 'UNBM' traverses the semi-permeable borders between doubling and tripling mother tongues in exile, looping these languages through one another and back again in the form of a highly adaptive poetic boomerang that returns from the "other side" of the linguistic threshold already changed. This translinguistic praxis explores writing as a mode of perpetual displacement, translating language in wide spirals outward to the farthest edges of the sonic/semantic divide, while gleaning materials for a poetics from even the minutest residues left behind. Resnikoff's compositional method engages by (mis)translation in/to​ Yiddish-, Hebrew-, Aramaic- and Akkadian- adapted​ sonic/semantic properties in​ grammar, syntax and lexicon, taking English as its temporary "host" while performing perpetual inflectional slippages-interlingual punning and fusion-slangs-as much as the "host" can absorb. The dybbuk (Yiddish: spirit-possessor), which the author's Jewish-Ashke ancestors believed to inhabit the body of the wild stutterer, mad person, heretic or "akher" [lit. other], becomes the peripheral focus​ of this poetry, as Resnikoff reimagines the ways in which such a "possession" by language itself might manifest in the ​"odd" practices of the poet, translator and Jew. The word "odd" here functions in deliberate echo of the terms against which Sabbatean stigma was first transcribed in 17th-century Palestine: "for the odd practices of a false messiah."


"Ariel Resnikoff's 'Unnatural Bird Migrator' ignites immediacy. It cast spells.