COME FROM
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COME FROM 〰️
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In her debut poetry collection, COME FROM, janan alexandra weaves from English into Arabic, exploring the joint projects of longing and belonging.
Part love song for the speaker’s mother, part grief song for ongoing postcolonial loss, this book reaches for, around, underneath, and through language—feeling for its limits and possibilities.
Drawing on both narrative and lyric impulses, alexandra invites readers into a world bristling with family, memory, home, and inheritance—all in the wake of dislocation and fracture. In one section of the book, we follow the speaker “back home” after years of separation; later, we encounter a series of parables in the form of an Arabic abecedarian, through which the speaker recovers parts of her mother tongue. Here, alexandra probes the gifts and wounds of language, invoking personal and communal histories marked with the longue durée of empire.
”I cannot explain it, but the poems, not only their sorrow, but their glee and their wonder and their tumult and their goddamn too, they somehow open their arms to us and bring us in, they set a place and say you can be here, you can rest here, right where you can hear the birds singing, the loves, the roots reaching as they are through the dark, toward us, always, I love these poems how they make welcome.” — Ross Gay, from the Foreword
“COME FROM arrives, 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 janan alexandra’s 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 poet’s every light & dark.”
“Quietly gorgeous, these poems awaken me. The alive of 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 you need “Affirmation.” And right now we all need “Why We Must Speak” and “Arab American Syntax”—and to consider “When there’s no ceiling left, how do we assemble the sentence?””
“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.”
COME FROM
〰️
COME FROM 〰️