A Technique for Operating on the Past

“My great-grandfather held a brain and studied it for signs of music.” In this video, Maya C. Popa reads her poem “A Technique for Operating on the Past,” which won the 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Popa, the author of American Faith (Sarabande Books, 2019), is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.