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Language for a New Century celebrates the artistic and cultural
forces flourishing today in the East, bringing together an
unprecedented selection of works by South Asian, East Asian, Middle
Eastern, and Central Asian poets as well as poets living in the
Diaspora. Some poets, such as Bei Dao and Mahmoud Darwish, are
acclaimed worldwide, but many more will be new to the reader. The
collection includes 400 unique voices political and apolitical,
monastic and erotic that represent a wider artistic movement that
challenges thousand-year-old traditions, broadening our notion of
contemporary literature. Each section of the anthology organized by
theme rather than by national affiliation is preceded by a personal
essay from the editors that introduces the poetry and exhorts
readers to examine their own identities in light of these powerful
poems. In an age of violence and terrorism, often predicated by
cultural ignorance, this anthology is a bold declaration of shared
humanity and devotion to the transformative power of art."
From migrations to pop culture, loss to la derive, 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.
Frederico Garcia 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 Andalucia. 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
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.
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