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 FROMweaves 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.