Overview

"Poetry that serves as an evocative portrayal of diverse landscapes and cultures. In these otherworldly poetry sequences, Samira Negrouche reminds us that ""all life is movement,"" where ""time passes through me / beings pass through me / they are me / I am them."" The ""I"" is representative of one voice, three voices, all voices, all rooted in movement as their bodies brush past one another, brush against thresholds of time and space. Everything is in flux—including the dream-like landscapes at the borders of borders—as the poet seeks to recover parts of self and memory, on both a personal and universal level. In these poems, history-laden locales such as Algiers, Timbuktu, N'Djamena, Cotonou, Zanzibar, Cape Town, and Gorée are evoked. Even the language, expertly and sensitively translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, refuses to be pinned down, as it loops back on itself. At times contradictory, at times fractured in meaning, syntax, and diction, the playful language is riddled with ""restless"" verbs. In the end, the ""I"" takes on prophetic overtones, instilling hope for the future."

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9781803093383

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"""A beautiful book, one that bears knowledge of grief and yet (or, perhaps, because of it) embraces the world.""--Praise for ""The Olive Trees' Jazz and Other Poems"" ""Ilya Kaminsky"" ""In this stunning book, Negrouche and Hacker bring us poems that are exquisite in the American language to which they have been translated, but are ineffably of Maghrebi provenance, and more particularly of exile. These are poems of history and geography--in ribbons, in shreds, torn from the Algerian War of Independence and from the Arab Spring. At the center are poems of transgressive love."" --Praise for ""The Olive Trees' Jazz and Other Poems"" ""Alicia Ostriker"""

Author Information

Samira Negrouche was born in Algiers where she continues to live and work. Her work has been shortlisted for the Dereck Walcott Prize for Poetry and the National Translation Award in Poetry. Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet and translator whose translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude, also published by Seagull Books, won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

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