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Shortlisted for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize/The Pitt Poetry Series“In
The Lives of Rain, Nathalie Handal has brought forth a work of radical displacement and uncertainty, moving continent to continent, giving voice to Palestinians of the diaspora in the utterance of one fiercely awake and compassionate, who, against warfare, occupation and brutality offers her native language, olives, wind, a herd of sheep or a burning mountain, radio music, a butterfly’s gaze. It is a poetry of never arriving, of villages erased from the maps, of tattooed waistlines and kalishnikovs, a goat and a corpse cut open side by side, where every house is a prison. In a spare, chiseled language without ornament, she writes an exilic lyric, fusing Arabic, English, Spanish and French into a polyglot testament of horror and survival. Habibti, que tal? she asks of those who wander country to country, while those left behind in Jenin, Gaza City, and Bethlehem inhabit a continued past of blood/of jailed cities. Her subject is memory and forgetting, the precariousness of identity and the fragility of human community; it is the experience of suffering without knowledge of its end. Handal is a poet of deftly considered paradoxes and reversals, sensory evocations and mysteries left beautifully unresolved. Hers is a language seared by history and marked by the impress of extremity; so it is suffused with a rare species of wisdom.
— From the Foreword by Carolyn Forché
About the author
Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, nonfiction and literary travel writer. She was raised in Latin America, France, and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Handal is the author of five poetry collections and is the editor of the groundbreaking classic
The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, named one of the top 10 Feminist Books by
The Guardian.
