come from

FOREWORD BY ROSS GAYHere is a collection that pulses with warmth and vitality, heralding the arrival of a fresh and vibrant voice on the poetry scene.Clear and concise, accessible and profound,janan alexandras debut poetry collectionCOME FROMweaves from English to Arabic, exploring the joint projects of longing and belonging.Part love song for the speakers mother and part grief song forongoing postcolonial loss, this book reaches for, around, andthrough languagefeeling for its limits and possibilities.COME FROM searches for what might be possible if we dislodge our practices of belonging, divest from nation and state, and instead turn deeply toward each other.Drawingon both narrative and lyric impulses, alexandra invites readers into a worldbristling with family, memory, home, and inheritanceall in the wake ofdislocation and fracture. In one section of the book, we follow the speakerback home after years of separation; later, we encounter a series of parablesin the form of an Arabic abecedarian, through which the speaker recovers partsof her mother tongueinvokingpersonal and communal histories marked with thelongue dureof empire.COME FROMinvestigateswhat is deeply interior while reaching toward the world with tenderness andgenerous attention.