Come from: Poems (New Poets of America, 56) - Hardcover

Alexandra, Janan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1960145673 ISBN 13: 9781960145673

Publisher: BOA Editions, Limited, 2025

Synopsis

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 has landed in New England where she teaches creative writing,
organizes poetry events, and plays fiddle with the Sweet May Dews.

Ross Gay was born in Youngstown, Ohio. He earned a BA from Lafayette College, an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a PhD in English from Temple University. He is the author of Be Holding (2020); Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award; Bringing the Shovel Down (2011); and Against Which (2006). He has also published an essay collection, The Book of Delights (2019). Gay is the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens (2014), and with Richard Wehrenberg, Jr., River (2014). His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Cave Canem, and the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference.

He is an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press and is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin'. He teaches at Indiana University and in Drew University's low-residency MFA program.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Come From

 

if we do not speak

in the night     in the kitchen

here leaning over the starrycounter

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 cannotspeak

Edition details

• Publisher: BOA Editions, Limited
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1960145673
• ISBN 13: 9781960145673
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 115