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Life in a Country Album: Poems
Winner, 2020 Palestine Book Award
Finalist, 2019 Foreword Indies Award
From migrations to pop culture, loss to la dérive, Life in a Country Album is a soundtrack of the global cultural landscape—borders and citizenship, hybrid identities and home, freedom and pleasure. It’s a vast and moving look at the world, at what home means, and the ways we coexist in an increasingly divided world. These poems are about the dialects of the heart—those we are incapable of parting from, and those that are largely forgotten. Life in a Country Album is a vital book for our times. With this beautiful, epic collection, Nathalie Handal affirms herself as one of our most diverse and important contemporary poets.
Finalist, 2019 Foreword Indies Award
From migrations to pop culture, loss to la dérive, Life in a Country Album is a soundtrack of the global cultural landscape—borders and citizenship, hybrid identities and home, freedom and pleasure. It’s a vast and moving look at the world, at what home means, and the ways we coexist in an increasingly divided world. These poems are about the dialects of the heart—those we are incapable of parting from, and those that are largely forgotten. Life in a Country Album is a vital book for our times. With this beautiful, epic collection, Nathalie Handal affirms herself as one of our most diverse and important contemporary poets.
- GenresPoetry
115 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2019
About the author
Nathalie Handal
28 books40 followersNathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Arab world. Described as “a Renaissance figure,” Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Kumunyakaa writes, “This cosmopolitan voice belongs to the human family, and it luxuriates in crossing necessary borders.” Her most recent books include the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía, which Alice Walker lauds as “poems of depth and weight and the sorrowing song of longing and resolve,” and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the 2011 Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, which The New York Times says is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” Handal is the editor of the groundbreaking classic The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, and co-editor of the W.W. Norton landmark anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, both Academy of American Poets bestsellers. Her most recent plays have been produced at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Bush Theatre and Westminster Abbey, London. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, winner of the 2011 Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, and Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award, among other honors. She is a professor at Columbia University and part of the Low-Residency MFA Faculty at Sierra Nevada College.
She writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.
She writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 13, 2019
Beautiful...
American Camino...what an outstanding poem.
American Camino...what an outstanding poem.
November 26, 2023
The doors of the language
swung out of breath
and if love is but a promise
to memory, what will history
say to the child
about to cross the street?
The tracks are a long timbre
in my dialects that keep disembarking
to re-embark.
I have to carefully
choose my words, to keep my wounds and love apart.
Why are you translating me? —I want to understand every word in your body. We walk through clouds
wrapped in ancient symbols We descend the hill wearing water
Maybe we are dead and don’t know it Maybe we are violet flowers and those we long
for love only our unmade hearts. This is not beauty or a sentence. This is not the moon chanting or the scarlet blue.
This is not rain or lies tearing down. This is not a suitcase or a fleeing day.
This is not Arabic jazz or a city of lights. This is not a mind wiping a past. This is not a muted mouth or a dare.
This is not a praise outlining a body about to commit a cry, a cry about to define a life, a life about to contract chaos to wind itself of the fever in its memory.
There is no consolation, just furies shivering in our spines and what we hoped we’d never have to see.
We need wanders more. : You mean wonders. : I mean the sea is lonely. : That happens when water is warfare. : That happens when love is lament.
Why didn’t I say: Take the leaves,
the fork, the photos, take the jars,
the albums, the postcards, take the
doors, the windows, the floors, the
ceilings, take the house, take the breaths,
take every magic and empty hand,
take the bad news and good news.
Take it all.
Take the grief of evenings.
Take the high waters.
Take nothing.
Everything will remember us.
Even the water from the jar,
and the world inside of it.
Look at what will
happen to
happiness,
to dreams,
to the spirits,
the shadows,
the voices,
the wings.
Heaven
is not high
enough
for our hearts,
this is the peak,
this is the place,
this is where love will—
It doesn’t matter where I was born where I lived, where I went, or what I did what matters is that time sculpted me seven times in the eternity
of the old city and saved me.
and I ask in what language
will I love in what waters
will I breath in what
voice will I find the world
in what sound will
I find the beats in
what sun will I learn
to speak in what love
will I learn to sing.
my found poem from this lyrical, searing book...
swung out of breath
and if love is but a promise
to memory, what will history
say to the child
about to cross the street?
The tracks are a long timbre
in my dialects that keep disembarking
to re-embark.
I have to carefully
choose my words, to keep my wounds and love apart.
Why are you translating me? —I want to understand every word in your body. We walk through clouds
wrapped in ancient symbols We descend the hill wearing water
Maybe we are dead and don’t know it Maybe we are violet flowers and those we long
for love only our unmade hearts. This is not beauty or a sentence. This is not the moon chanting or the scarlet blue.
This is not rain or lies tearing down. This is not a suitcase or a fleeing day.
This is not Arabic jazz or a city of lights. This is not a mind wiping a past. This is not a muted mouth or a dare.
This is not a praise outlining a body about to commit a cry, a cry about to define a life, a life about to contract chaos to wind itself of the fever in its memory.
There is no consolation, just furies shivering in our spines and what we hoped we’d never have to see.
We need wanders more. : You mean wonders. : I mean the sea is lonely. : That happens when water is warfare. : That happens when love is lament.
Why didn’t I say: Take the leaves,
the fork, the photos, take the jars,
the albums, the postcards, take the
doors, the windows, the floors, the
ceilings, take the house, take the breaths,
take every magic and empty hand,
take the bad news and good news.
Take it all.
Take the grief of evenings.
Take the high waters.
Take nothing.
Everything will remember us.
Even the water from the jar,
and the world inside of it.
Look at what will
happen to
happiness,
to dreams,
to the spirits,
the shadows,
the voices,
the wings.
Heaven
is not high
enough
for our hearts,
this is the peak,
this is the place,
this is where love will—
It doesn’t matter where I was born where I lived, where I went, or what I did what matters is that time sculpted me seven times in the eternity
of the old city and saved me.
and I ask in what language
will I love in what waters
will I breath in what
voice will I find the world
in what sound will
I find the beats in
what sun will I learn
to speak in what love
will I learn to sing.
my found poem from this lyrical, searing book...
January 18, 2020
Her words are beautiful because her tongue bends to the languages of the places she is from and been. She adds a broad perspective on home and country, broader and wider than one is accustomed, and it's wonderful and magnificent. She shows that home is the world and not just a specific plot of land. She shows that a foreign language is just new vocabulary we've yet to learn.
January 27, 2020
Nathalie Handal is the best living women's poet today. And again, another brilliant beautiful well-crafted book. Go read it.
July 15, 2020
The writing is good. Took me a while to get used to. I enjoyed the first and last poem the most. There was a lot I didn’t get and I kinda appreciate that.
February 1, 2020
Being constantly in search of a meaning for the word "home" I felt an immediate sisterhood with the author. Juggling identities in multiple languages and countries is a risky and delicate effort that requires a special inclination for listening and even more for empathy. Handal has both, plus a mastery of a language which is enriched and elevated by layers of meanings that she constantly translates and turns into a powerful voice.
She makes me feel at home in her words - which is what we wandering souls need and long for. Bravissima. And what we need in this ages of borders. She just smashes them with grace.
She makes me feel at home in her words - which is what we wandering souls need and long for. Bravissima. And what we need in this ages of borders. She just smashes them with grace.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews