come from

(Paperback)

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janan alexandra's debut poetry collection,COME FROM,weaves from English to Arabic, exploring the joint projects of longing andbelonging. Part love song for the speaker's mother and part grief song forongoing postcolonial loss, this book reaches for, around, underneath, andthrough language-feeling for its limits and possibilities.

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-probing the gifts and wounds of language, invokingpersonal and communal histories marked with the long-dure of empire.

This book searches forwhat might be possible if we dislodge our practices of belonging from the mythof wholeness, divest from nation and state, and instead turn deeply toward eachother. Here is a collection that pulses with warmth and vitality, heralding thearrival of a fresh and vibrant voice on the poetry scene. Clear and concise,accessible yet profound,COME FROMinvestigateswhat is deeply interior while reaching toward the world with tenderness andgenerous attention.

Reviews

come fromarrives, it seems to me, in the footsteps of the cats, of the great Etel Adnan, of the worn & sun-hot stone. Wisdom. Vision. What a dream to find this sound, to reach & reach again for jananalexandras brilliant, steadfast attention each phrase an altar of life, a route to past-language. Question, exclamation, sorrow, memory. I am more alive to read this poets every light & dark.aracelisgirmay, author ofthe black maria

Quietly gorgeous, these poems awaken me. Thealiveof the language: the wind sweeps my head, suddens my wonder (Ars Poetica, a perfect gem of an unrhymed sonnet). This is a book of tenderness and generosity. You may not know it, but youneedAffirmation. And right now weallneed Why We Must Speak and Arab American Syntaxand to consider When theres no ceiling left, how do we assemble the sentence Ellen Dor Watson, author ofpray me stay eager

Here, janan alexandra makes audible something ancient about poetry, that it courses through our anatomies, through the larynx and out the mouth: girl makes / her tongue a slab of meat / between rows of teeth. / th!, th!, th! : / sound of feet / slicing through snow. Listen to the smallest gestures of the hand on paper: in the orthography of an aleph is an animate world wound with centuries of violence and wonderment. Carolina Ebeid, author of Dauerwunder, a brief record of facts

Author Bio

janan alexandra is the daughter of aLebanese mother and a Beirut-born American father. Her life has been nothing ifnot peripatetic, with roots scattered in Cyprus, Pakistan, Lebanon, and manycorners of the U.S. Since 2015 she has taught creative writing in community-basedliteracy centers and schools, working with young folks in Los Angeles, Maine,Washington DC, and Southern Indiana. A 2021-2022 Creative Research FulbrightScholar, janan has also received support from the Martha's Vineyard Institutefor Creative Writing, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the BucknellSeminar for Younger Poets. You can read some of her work in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The AdroitJournal, The Rumpus, Mizna, and elsewhere in print and online. Mostrecently, janan has landed in New England where she teaches creative writing,organizes poetry events, and plays fiddle with the Sweet May Dews.