Linguistically fluid and geographically expansive, Nathalie Handal's Life in a Country Album is a haunting hymn of shapeshifting. Intimate and political at once, it is composed from a palette that comprises brief revelations, such as Tendresse: A Testament as well as expansive meditations like American Camino, in which she asks, "So what if some hyphenate, and others don't?" 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 seventh collection, Nathalie reaffirms that she remains an urgent and singular voice in contemporary poetry.
Raised in Latin America, Nathalie Handal is a French-American poet, playwright, translator, and editor originally of a Palestinian family from Bethlehem. In addition to Latin America, she has been educated in, and has lived in, Asia, Europe, the Arab world, and the United States. Nathalie is a professor at Columbia University, a Visiting Writer at the American University of Rome and she writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders. Widely acclaimed for her writing both as essayist and poet, Nathalie holds an MFA in poetry from Bennington College and an MPhil in drama and English from the University of London. Life in a Country Album is her seventh collection of poetry.
"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 collection's many voices and cityscapes, and--most poignantly--via the borders between bodies, nations and hearts. Absolutely gorgeous." - Tracy K. Smith; "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
