The Shapes Our Tongues Make

The poems in The Shapes Our Tongues Make track how I gradually became disillusioned with my life in America while falling madly, desperately, hopelessly in love with my birth city of Budapest.

I was born to two Hungarian parents in the 9th district of Pest and did not speak a word of English when we immigrated to the U.S. while I was in the first grade—first to Los Angeles, then to Las Vegas four years later. I spent most of my summers in the Hungarian countryside growing up, so I kept the language, but quickly lost my connection to my true hometown.

It wasn’t until I started my MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas at 21 that I returned to Budapest properly, and began to develop a private and intimate relationship with it as an adult—during the summers at first, then also during the winter break, until I finally moved there in 2019 and stayed for two years of the pandemic.