Böcker av Nathalie Handal

Shortlisted for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize/The Pitt Poetry Series“In The Lives of Rain, Nathalie Handal has brought forth a work of radical displacement and uncertainty, moving continent to continent, giving voice to Palestinians of the diaspora in the utterance of one fiercely awake and compassionate, who, against warfare, occupation and brutality offers her native language, olives, wind, a herd of sheep or a burning mountain, radio music, a butterfly’s gaze. It is a poetry of never arriving, of villages erased from the maps, of tattooed waistlines and kalishnikovs, a goat and a corpse cut open side by side, where every house is a prison. In a spare, chiseled language without ornament, she writes an exilic lyric, fusing Arabic, English, Spanish and French into a polyglot testament of horror and survival. Habibti, que tal? she asks of those who wander country to country, while those left behind in Jenin, Gaza City, and Bethlehem inhabit a continued past of blood/of jailed cities. Her subject is memory and forgetting, the precariousness of identity and the fragility of human community; it is the experience of suffering without knowledge of its end. Handal is a poet of deftly considered paradoxes and reversals, sensory evocations and mysteries left beautifully unresolved. Hers is a language seared by history and marked by the impress of extremity; so it is suffused with a rare species of wisdom. — From the Foreword by Carolyn Forché

The question of belonging lies at the heart of Life in a Country Album: who gets to decide who belongs? "Now that we are guests in our bodies, how do we survive?" In its clarity, craft and chimeric language, this book is a love letter and admonition mailed by the same stamp. Nathalie remains an urgent and singular voice in contemporary poetry.

A new collection from the award winning poet Nathalie Handal, whose work includes The Republics, Poet in Andalucia, and Love and Strange Horses.