Tetra Nova

Sophia Terazawa is the author of three poetry collections, Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum, 2021), Anon (Deep Vellum, 2023), and the forthcoming Oracular Maladies (Noemi Press, 2026), a finalist for the 2023 Noemi Press Book Award. She has also published two award-winning chapbooks, I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press, 2016) and Correspondent Medley (Factory Hollow Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize.

In the opening to Sophia Terazawa’s Tetra Nova, an elephant knocks the narrator unconscious. He awakens to a soft skull. Ears on top of his head. The disappearance of his fingers and ankles. All anatomy rearranged. The narrator is a stuffed plush Panda. He falls back asleep, then awakens again: now she’s a human girl. No one warns you about this shape-shifting. Like the body of its stuffed plush narrator Panda, Terazawa’s writing removes the points of articulation in Western storytelling, elevating a joyfully disjointed sensibility in its place. Tetra Nova celebrates the multitude, proving there’s more room for every voice once you break the mould. —The Rumpus