Life in a Country Album
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WINNER OF THE PALESTINE BOOK AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE FOREWORD INDIES BOOK AWARD
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY PICK
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.
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Distant Places and Pulses: A Conversation with Nathalie Handal by Renée H. Shea
—Poets & Writers
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 sixth collection, Nathalie reaffirms that she remains an urgent and singular voice in contemporary poetry.
—flipped eye publishing
Love 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, Poet Laureate of the United States
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, author of The New York Times Bestseller The Emperor's Children
I love this book. It’s simply poetry that doesn’t quit moving. It tells a story. It’s water, it shimmers.
—Eileen Myles, legendary poet and Lambda Literary Award winner
Life in a Country Album is a deeply ethical offering to all whose lives are crossed by borders, written with steady, uncompromising vision. For those who wonder how we might carry our stories to wherever it is we are going, out of “salt, syllables and stones” she has shown how to build us a boat.
—A No-State Solution in Poetry, Warscapes
Handal’s upbringing spans continents. Life in a Country Album chronicles her life between two nations in particular: the United States and France. In multilingual poems, Handal explores speech and its fractures through the lens of belonging and diasporic wandering. The intersections of the two aging empires, the traffic of refugees and immigrants within and between them, and the worlds that thrive despite their colonial histories inhabit and animate these poems. In Handal’s capacious poems, these mementos transcend the personal and open up to the reader, becoming albums of our own lives and losses. Handal crafts lustrous forms for each poem, designing spaces with an architect’s precision and elegance. In the American Album, Handal’s lines are imbued with the fullness of America’s histories. There are apologies owed for centuries to the people on whose land this nation is constructed, people who are still waiting. Like Orpheus, Handal and her speaker grieve the losses of history, old and new. But her response resists stasis, and so she crafts these songs of cities, of displacements that connect her to the millions of us navigating our own exiles. Hope resurfaces in the smallest moments throughout this beautiful collection.—The Rumpus
Nathalie Handal’s rich, diverse, and innovative body of work reflects her own multicultural, multilingual, and multinational life. Life in a Country Album brings together her fierce intellect and passionate sensuality to create a meditation on migration, identity, and home. In Handal’s poems, juxtapositions come naturally—the seamless movements of a poet for whom the description “global citizen” is bone and blood, a traveler who finds a way to be at home wherever she is yet can’t seem ever to arrive.
—Poets & Writers
Through a consideration of pop culture, migration, borders, and the larger global context, Handal questions the meaning of “home” in an increasingly polarized world.
—Big Books - Publishers Weekly
When faced with the term “country album,” I immediately think of songs from Nashville and Austin and the usual musical formula including a guitar, a twanging voice, and tragic events that unfold over beer and whiskey. I think, specifically, of the southern and western United States where the sounds of the local language often include the same cadences and colloquialisms as the very songs I imagine. Nathalie Handal’s collection of poems Life in a Country Album forces the boundaries of what a country album could really be—what the word “country” itself means, both as placeholder and a means of personal identification
—World Literature Today
Handal boldly navigates her hyphenated identities, she also fervently dismisses them. The poems invite readers to question if and/or how a country defines one’s identity and belonging.
—Arab America
Though Handal is of many cultures, in her latest collection, Life in a Country Album, she brings this particular Palestinian sensibility to her poems and to her encounters with her many countries and languages of the text. Handal’s upbringing spans continents, and she is at home in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic, just as she is in many countries, from her birthplace in the Caribbean to her familial homes in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and in the cities of Europe, Latin America, and the United States where she is in constant motion.
—This Week in Palestine
Palestine Book Award, Judges' Notes: Life in a Country Album, the seventh collection by Nathalie Handal, is most reflective of those essential thematic and stylistic characteristics which render her poetic voice uniquely distinctive. Language here goes beyond linguistic or cultural confines, encompassing a lyricism that embodies fragmentation as well as wholeness. While relaying the deep view of Palestinianness, these poems expand the vastness of disaporic and exilic experiences on universal levels.
—Subhi Hadidi
