Nathalie Handal

Linguistically fluid and geographically expansive, Nathalie Handal's Life in a Country Album is a haunting hymn of shapeshifting. Intimate and political at once, it is composed from a palette that comprises brief revelations, such as Tendresse: A Testament as well as expansive meditations like American Camino, in which she asks, "So what if some hyphenate, and others don't?" This question of belonging lies at the heart of Life in a Country Album: who gets to decide who belongs? Can you be exiled from your own sense of self, or as Nathalie puts it in Europa Nostra, "Now that we are guests in our bodies, how do we survive?" One of the remarkable things about this collection is how our current global geopolitics can alter how it is read: an ill-reasoned airstrike and the sense of a safe home becomes precarious. If a bed is a city of teeming dreams then this collection is a world of human possibilities. In its clarity, craft and chimeric language, it is a love letter and admonition mailed by the same stamp. In this, her seventh collection, Nathalie reaffirms that she remains an urgent and singular voice in contemporary poetry.

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.

"The Republics is a massively brilliant new work, a leap in literature we have not seen. It's gripping, harrowing, and at times horrific while its form paradoxically is fresh, luscious, and original. Bypassing pity and transforming pain into language Handal stars. She has recorded like Alice Walker, Paul Celan, John Hershey, and Carolyn Forché some of the worst civilization has offered humankind and somehow made it art."—Sapphire

Frederico García lived in Manhattan from 1929 to 1930, and the poetry he wrote about the city, Poet in New York, was posthumously published in 1940. Eighty years after Lorca’s sojourn to America, Nathalie Handal, a poet from New York, went to Spain to write Poet in Andalucía. Handal recreated Lorca’s journey in reverse.

"Sometimes we have questions that seem to defy answers or even suppositions but then we find Love and Strange Horses to help us map out a course to continue loving life. A really wonderful, thoughtful read by an intriguing new voice."—Nikki Giovanni

"The Neverfield is a work which insists on itself. It is poetry of a shining quality from a poet whose voice is sure and unafraid." -Lucille Clifton "The Neverfield poem is an epic journey, a passionate search for beauty and truth. If beauty is truth, and truth is beauty, the poems in this volume lead us once again to that realization. The Neverfield is an enchanting work, sharing with us a poet's true vision." -Rudolfo Anaya "Nathalie Handal's poems in her collection The Neverfield Poem are wide as breath, lyrically linked as an elegantly stiched Palestinian bodice, and dreamily, deeply evocative as the stories that never leave us from the first time we hear them." -Naomi Shihab Nye "Nathalie...does find her homeland and her self in the kingdom of the word, to which she longs and belongs." -World Literature "The Neverfield Poem ...unfolds, revealing a landscape as complex and as singular as breath." -Aljadid "the yellow branch kneeled in front of my crying feet, / the field's elevating fingers seized the sunlight, / nothing else existed but yellow/ yellow/ was I ever to see more?" -Excerpted from The Neverfield An emerging young talent in the field of poetry and culture, Nathalie Handal, a French-American poet of Palestinian descent, writes with great passion and eloquence on the subjects of displacement, diaspora, and the search for cross-cultural identity.