Life in a Country Album: Poems

by Nathalie Handal

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822965947
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/15/2019
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	115
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Her recent poetry books include the flash collection The Republics (2015), winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing, and the Arab American Book Award; Poet in Andalucía (2012); and Love and Strange Horses (2010), winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is the author of eight plays, editor of two anthologies, and her poetry, essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, among others. Handal is the recipient of awards from The Lannan Foundation, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Fondazione di Venezia, Emily Harvey Foundation, among others. Her work brings her to audiences globally. She is a professor at Columbia University, and writes the literary travel column “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders magazine. 

Read an Excerpt

Country of Torn Men
Here, men don’t lie
or lean on their beds and pray;
they sit on stools, sing by a wall,
wonder if jagged lines glisten
when divided hearts break the law
and miles of giant afternoons,
when the hesitation on lips
slides further into doubt
the way the desert does
when language is sealed
to keep breaths
from dividing the mirror.
Or is it the nation?
 

Table of Contents

Life in a Country Album ix

Bleu Blanc Rouge

[Album français]

Les chemins lumière 7

Origine 16

Tendresse: A Testament 17

Dor 18

Even in Love 19

Shur-e Hayat 20

Longing: une lettre 21

L'amour auprès de Rabelais 22

Un western avec Gary Cooper 23

Désir: A Distance 24

Killing Me Softly 25

La gaffe 26

Illuminata 27

Declaration of Independence 28

Une fin 29

[Album arabe à Paris - Place des États Unis, Conversations avec Mahmoud Darwish]

Country of Torn Men 33

Borders 34

Home in Transit 35

Interior Roads 36

Your Mystery Is the Milky Way 37

[Album méditerranéen]

The Record Keeper 41

Europa Nostra 42

Aleppo 43

Ghetto 44

Echoes: A Historical Afterward 46

Letter from the Levant 47

The Oranges 48

Lettera a Damir 49

The Messengers 50

Keskin Biçak 51

Cara Aceitunada 53

Sculpting Time Seven Times 54

Orphic 55

Canto Mediterraneo 57

Red White Blue

[American Album]

& Co. 63

Holy Cosmos 65

A New Era in Space 66

Submarine 67

Jesus Hung the River 68

Midnight Train to Georgia 70

Ovid & Us 72

Twenty Tattoos 73

On the Seven 74

Takes at the Bowery 78

Edge 80

American Camino 81

Album Mixte

Eleutheria 91

Acknowledgments 93

Editorial Reviews

In odes to the Francophone diaspora and Mediterranean crisis or in vibrant celebration of American complexity, Nathalie Handal illuminates the luxuriance and longing of deracination. A contemporary Orpheus, she hymns our most urgent and ineffable truths; her poems sing.”—Claire Messud
 


“I love this book. It’s simply poetry that doesn’t quit moving. It tells a story. It’s water, it shimmers.” 
—Eileen Myles

 


“Life in a Country Album reminds me of the irresistible spare stylization of French New Wave cinema. I love how the desire and longing running through these poems reaches me via the collections many voices and cityscapes, and—most poignantly—via the borders between bodies, nations and hearts. Absolutely gorgeous.”—Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate

“Life in a Country Album is a deeply ethical offering to all whose lives are crossed by borders, written with steady, uncompromising vision in the language of the many paths Handal has walked in search of belonging.”
—Warscapes
 

“Handal crafts lustrous forms for each poem, designing spaces with an architect’s precision and elegance.”
—The Rumpus
 

“The layers of discovery in this collection are a feast of all flavors, from all corners of the world, that teach me how we must reinvent our perceptions of nation and country as identifiers and how each of us presents in such an interconnected world.”
—World Literature Today
 

“These poems are stunning and marvelously wrought, making Life in a Country Album a book that you’ll return to again and again.” —Rain Taxi
 

From the Publisher