Description
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 Goree 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.
About the Author
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.
Reviews
"Solio-aptly named for a word whose root belongs to several world languages-means crossing, threshold, or coming to attention. This word, used in the last poem of the volume, showcases Negrouche's repeated segue between presence and absence, observation and vision. It indicates her ability to shoulder the weight of the universe's memory that lives in her 'three mother tongues'. . . Her poetry reads like an unhurried act of poetic self-accomplishment." * World Literature Today *
"Negrouche's writing is dynamic, compelling and deeply engaged, exploring the raw facets of humanity. Solio nourishes the soul, with its inherent spirituality and musicality, and dances its way gracefully into the heart." * Modern Poetry in Translation *
"Reading Solio is like attending a musical or theatrical performance - the reader is first and foremost a listener, learning the choreography of words repeated, distilled, amplified, and gifted back unto the world of beings and things where everything is in perpetual flux - the poet, as well as the humans and geographies she encounters." * Los Angeles Review *
"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 *
"In the lyric essay "Who is Speaking," Francophone Algerian poet Samira Negrouche imagines greater human consciousness as a poetic lifeworld in which "[s]ilence is a landscape and my ancestors know no borders." Her most recent offering in English, Solio, draws us fully into this world. Each created in collaboration, one with musicians, the other with a choreographer, the two books feature dynamic speakers whose movements of music, meditation, and improvisation resonate through Carlson's translations, which are attuned to their interconnections of tone, prosody, form, and perspective. The poems intuitively weave together impressions of other lives: natural, distant, imagined, ancestral-even ours on the impossible side of the page. These figures inhabit worlds woven of the same psychic thread, realizing a vision of silence as a cultivated habitat for interiority, the listener woven into a world made of listening." * Exacting Clam *
Book Information
ISBN 9781803093383
Author Samira Negrouche
Format Paperback
Page Count 140
Imprint Seagull Books London Ltd
Publisher Seagull Books London Ltd
Weight(grams) 200g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 159mm * 10mm
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 Goree 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.
About the Author
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.
Reviews
"Solio-aptly named for a word whose root belongs to several world languages-means crossing, threshold, or coming to attention. This word, used in the last poem of the volume, showcases Negrouche's repeated segue between presence and absence, observation and vision. It indicates her ability to shoulder the weight of the universe's memory that lives in her 'three mother tongues'. . . Her poetry reads like an unhurried act of poetic self-accomplishment." * World Literature Today *
"Negrouche's writing is dynamic, compelling and deeply engaged, exploring the raw facets of humanity. Solio nourishes the soul, with its inherent spirituality and musicality, and dances its way gracefully into the heart." * Modern Poetry in Translation *
"Reading Solio is like attending a musical or theatrical performance - the reader is first and foremost a listener, learning the choreography of words repeated, distilled, amplified, and gifted back unto the world of beings and things where everything is in perpetual flux - the poet, as well as the humans and geographies she encounters." * Los Angeles Review *
"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 *
"In the lyric essay "Who is Speaking," Francophone Algerian poet Samira Negrouche imagines greater human consciousness as a poetic lifeworld in which "[s]ilence is a landscape and my ancestors know no borders." Her most recent offering in English, Solio, draws us fully into this world. Each created in collaboration, one with musicians, the other with a choreographer, the two books feature dynamic speakers whose movements of music, meditation, and improvisation resonate through Carlson's translations, which are attuned to their interconnections of tone, prosody, form, and perspective. The poems intuitively weave together impressions of other lives: natural, distant, imagined, ancestral-even ours on the impossible side of the page. These figures inhabit worlds woven of the same psychic thread, realizing a vision of silence as a cultivated habitat for interiority, the listener woven into a world made of listening." * Exacting Clam *
Book Information
ISBN 9781803093383
Author Samira Negrouche
Format Paperback
Page Count 140
Imprint Seagull Books London Ltd
Publisher Seagull Books London Ltd
Weight(grams) 200g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 159mm * 10mm
