Come from: Poems (New Poets of America, 56) - Hardcover

Alexandra, Janan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1960145673 ISBN 13: 9781960145673

Verlag: BOA Editions, Limited, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

FOREWORD BY ROSS GAY

Here is a collection that pulses with warmth and vitality, heralding the arrival of a fresh and vibrant voice on the poetry scene. Clear and concise, accessible and profound, janan alexandra’s debut poetry collection come from weaves from English to Arabic, exploring the joint projects of longing and belonging.

Part love song for the speaker’s mother and part grief song forongoing postcolonial loss, this book reaches for, around, andthrough language—feeling for its limits and possibilities. come from searches for what might be possible if we dislodge our practices of belonging, divest from nation and state, and instead turn deeply toward each other. 

Drawingon both narrative and lyric impulses, alexandra invites readers into a worldbristling with family, memory, home, and inheritance—all in the wake ofdislocation and fracture. In one section of the book, we follow the speaker“back home” after years of separation; later, we encounter a series of parablesin the form of an Arabic abecedarian, through which the speaker recovers partsof her mother tongue—invokingpersonal and communal histories marked with the longue durée of empire.

come from investigateswhat is deeply interior while reaching toward the world with tenderness andgenerous attention. 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

janan alexandra is the daughter of aLebanese mother and a Beirut-born American father. Her roots stretch across Cyprus, Pakistan, Lebanon, and manycorners of the U.S. She has taught creative writing courses in Los Angeles, Maine,Washington DC, and Southern Indiana. A FulbrightScholar, janan has landed in New England where she teaches creative writing,organizes poetry events, and plays fiddle with the Sweet May Dews.

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Come From

 

if we do not speak

in the night     in the kitchen

here leaning over the starrycounter

like two hunched sunflowers

 

if we do not stand     stooped

like this     picking at cold lasagna

which is neither the food

of your country     nor my own

how will we carry this tin pail

sloshing     with the question

 

can you imagine walking

into a softly lit room

in the world & feeling

hereiam, homewithallofyou?

 

to be known in the arithmetic

of belonging     we follow

an order     of operations

 

we do the math

    enough     & not enough.

what are you     really really?

    from from?

 

really we are     the field

in each other’s eyes

 

we hope     to die surrounded    

by our own languages—   

even those we cannotspeak

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BOA Editions, Limited
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1960145673
• ISBN 13: 9781960145673
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 115
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar