Book Size:
Pages: 208
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781623716271
Imprint: Interlink Books
Release date: Spring 2025
Category: LiteratureThe Lives of Rain
20th Anniversary Edition
$ 20About this book
Shortlisted for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize/The Pitt Poetry Series.
In The Lives of Rain, Nathalie Handal has brought forth a work of radical displacement and uncertainty, moving continent to continent, giving voice to Palestinians of the diaspora in the utterance of one fiercely awake and compassionate, who, against warfare, occupation and brutality offers her native language, olives, wind, a herd of sheep or a burning mountain, radio music, a butterfly's gaze. It is a poetry of never arriving, of villages erased from the maps, of tattooed waistlines and kalishnikovs, a goat and a corpse cut open side by side, where every house is a prison. In a spare, chiseled language without ornament, she writes an exilic lyric, fusing Arabic, English, Spanish and French into a polyglot testament of horror and survival. Habibti, que tal? she asks of those who wander country to country, while those left behind in Jenin, Gaza City, and Bethlehem inhabit a continued past of blood/of jailed cities. Her subject is memory and forgetting, the precariousness of identity and the fragility of human community; it is the experience of suffering without knowledge of its end. Handal is a poet of deftly considered paradoxes and reversals, sensory evocations and mysteries left beautifully unresolved. Hers is a language seared by history and marked by the impress of extremity; so it is suffused with a rare species of wisdom.
—From the Foreword by Carolyn Forche
About the author
Nathalie Handal has lived in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. Poet, playwright, writer, editor, critic and literary activist, she finished her postgraduate studies in English and Drama at University of London, her MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Bennington College, Vermont, her Master of Arts in English and her Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Communications at Simmons College, Boston.
Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies and she is the editor of The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (Interlink, 2000), an Academy of American Poets bestseller and winner of the 2002 Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles Book Award. She has recently recorded “Traveling Rooms,” a CD of her poetry with improvisational music by Vladimir Miller and Alexandr Alexandrov (ASC Records, 1999). She teaches at Columbia University.
Reviews
“In The Lives of Rain, Nathalie Handal has brought forth a work of radical displacement and uncertainty, moving continent to continent, giving voice to Palestinians of the diaspora in the utterance of one fiercely awake and compassionate, who, against warfare, occupation and brutality offers her native language, olives, wind, a herd of sheep or a burning mountain, radio music, a butterfly’s gaze. It is a poetry of never arriving, of villages erased from the maps, of tattooed waistlines and kalishnikovs, a goat and a corpse cut open side by side, where every house is a prison. In a spare, chiseled language without ornament, she writes an exilic lyric, fusing Arabic, English, Spanish and French into a polyglot testament of horror and survival. Habibti, que tal? she asks of those who wander country to country, while those left behind in Jenin, Gaza City, and Bethlehem inhabit a continued past of blood/of jailed cities. Her subject is memory and forgetting, the precariousness of identity and the fragility of human community; it is the experience of suffering without knowledge of its end. Handal is a poet of deftly considered paradoxes and reversals, sensory evocations and mysteries left beautifully unresolved. Hers is a language seared by history and marked by the impress of extremity; so it is suffused with a rare species of wisdom.“
—From the Foreword by Carolyn Forche
“Nathalie Handal has brought forth a work of radical displacement and uncertainty, moving continent to continent, giving voice to Palestinians of the diaspora…Handal is a poet of deftly considered paradoxes and reversals, sensory evocations and mysteries left beautifully unresolved.“
—From the Foreword by Carolyn Forche
“Claire Messud writes, Nathalie Handal “illuminates the luxuriance and longing of deracination”—a contemporary Orpheus.“
“Handal is a brilliant, poetic chronicler of the human condition and a philosopher of the most lyrical reaches.“
—Pleiades
“Handal has lived all over the world—her ear for language and ability to see the world a little differently than most people sets her apart from some of her poet peers.“
—The Greyhound
“Nathalie Handal’s poetry defies definition. It’s an act of border crossing. She creates a perfect space of translation. Her work asks us to redefine the categories that we use to identify people.“
—Pergamonmuseum, Berlin
“Handal is an important and eloquent voice whose poetic vision is as rare as it is necessary.“
“The Lives of Rain is a book of exile and wandering, geographically and emotionally. In it are wars, loves, scars, ancestors. In it are olive trees, lemon trees, weddings, music, fear. In it are English, French, Arabic, Spanish, ‘the breath of cities,’ the blue hour of a woman’s body. Nathalie Handal is a poet for our time of crisis and need, for our awakening sense of the battles of eros and thanatos in our world.“
“Some poets have a fire in the belly, an urgent need to tell the truth for the sake of those who do not know, and those who do. Nathalie Handal is one such poet. Yet her poems transcend the fire of their birth: there is also a cool intelligence here, the words of a witness who will tell the story and get it right. These brave, sensual and striking poems humanize the Palestinian people at a time in history when they are too often dehumanized. Gracias, Nathalie.“
—Denise Duhamel
“In The Lives of Rain we catch the accent and the stress of displacement, of being in the wrong place, ‘shadows behind shadows’—Nathalie Handal’s exilic tone stays and roots itself.“
“Great writing, hard, moving, tough, real.“
“The Lives of Rain reminds me of an essay by Edward Said [Reflections on Exile]. The melody is mine, belongs to the reader, as I am also this hatless man: his maps, his books, his memories, his exile his half-forgotten name on a bench by the river…Une vraie poétique du déplacement, sensuelle, érotique et (pourquoi pas) politique.“
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