come from (New Poets of America, 56) - Softcover

Alexandra, Janan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1960145479 ISBN 13: 9781960145475

Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd., 2025

Synopsis

Foreword by Ross Gay

Here 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 alexandra’s debut poetry collection come from weaves from English to Arabic, exploring the joint projects of longing and belonging.

Part love song for the speaker’s mother and part grief song for ongoing postcolonial loss, this book reaches for, around, and through language—feeling 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. 

Drawing on both narrative and lyric impulses, alexandra invites readers into a world bristling with family, memory, home, and inheritance—all in the wake of dislocation and fracture. In one section of the book, we follow the speaker “back home” after years of separation; later, we encounter a series of parables in the form of an Arabic abecedarian, through which the speaker recovers parts of her mother tongue—invoking personal and communal histories marked with the longue durée of empire.

come from investigates what is deeply interior while reaching toward the world with tenderness and generous attention. 

About this title

About the Authors

janan alexandra is the daughter of a Lebanese mother and a Beirut-born American father. Her life has been nothing if not peripatetic, with roots scattered in Cyprus, Pakistan, Lebanon, and many corners of the U.S. Since 2015 she has taught creative writing in community-based literacy centers and schools, working with young folks in Los Angeles, Maine, Washington DC, and Southern Indiana. A 2021-2022 Creative Research Fulbright Scholar, janan has also received support from the Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. You can read some of her work in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, Mizna, and elsewhere in print and online. Most recently, janan currently lives in Bloomington, IN.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Come From

 

if we do not speak

in the night     in the kitchen

here leaning over the starry counter

like two hunched sunflowers

 

if we do not stand     stooped

like this     picking at cold lasagna

which is neither the food

of your country     nor my own

how will we carry this tin pail

sloshing     with the question

 

can you imagine walking

into a softly lit room

in the world & feeling

hereiam, homewithallofyou?

 

to be known in the arithmetic

of belonging     we follow

an order     of operations

 

we do the math

     enough     & not enough.

what are you     really really?

     from from?

 

really we are     the field

in each other’s eyes

 

we hope     to die surrounded    

by our own languages—   

even those we cannot speak

Edition details

• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1960145479
• ISBN 13: 9781960145475
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 115