Magdalena Zurawski is a poet and novelist whose work joins lyric attention, memory, queer experience, language, embodiment, and experimental narrative form. Her books include the novel The Bruise, the poetry collections Companion Animal and The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom, and the essay Being Human Is an Occult Practice.
The magazine published an excerpt from The Bruise in Issue 29. The passage, titled The Bridge, follows a student’s repeated sight of a rusty bridge beyond campus and the emotional change produced by a story attached to the landscape.
The Bruise and “The Bridge”
The Bruise won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award. The novel follows a young woman whose mysterious physical bruise becomes entangled with imagination, writing, desire, fear, and the problem of narrating experience.
In The Bridge, geography develops through repetition. Campus, river, grasses, houses, road, bridge, and morning light return as the narrator walks, remembers, and reinterprets the scene. A landscape first experienced through beauty gathers loneliness and social secrecy as new knowledge enters it.
Memory, place, and perception
Zurawski’s prose gives attention to the way perception changes after an event or story. The bridge remains visibly the same while the narrator’s relation to it changes. Description therefore carries memory and feeling at once, with long sentences reproducing the mind’s effort to locate itself inside a place.
This sensitivity to lived environment connects the excerpt with broader writing about place, migration, memory, and identity. Readers can follow related work through contemporary poets.
Poetry and experimental form
Zurawski’s poetry extends her attention to language as an event. Companion Animal and The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom move through lyric address, philosophical inquiry, humor, intimacy, and the material life of words.
Her work belongs naturally beside experimental poetry, especially writing that allows syntax, repetition, essayistic thought, and shifts in register to shape the reader’s experience.
Teaching and literary context
Zurawski studied Comparative Literature at Brown University and completed a doctorate in American Literature at Duke University. She later joined the University of Georgia, where she teaches English and Creative Writing and directs the Creative Writing Program.
Her career also includes poetry-community work and the Minor American Reading Series in Durham, alongside continued writing across fiction, poetry, criticism, translation, and creative nonfiction.
Magazine appearance
Issue 29 preserves The Bridge as an excerpt from The Bruise. The passage offers a concentrated view of the novel’s interest in perception, place, storytelling, and the emotional pressure carried by ordinary surroundings.
Past Issues places the excerpt within the magazine’s chronology.
Further reading
Magdalena Zurawski’s official site documents her books and literary work. The University of Georgia provides her faculty biography and bibliography. Her official page for The Bruise records the novel’s publication and awards.