Come from

Auteur

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.

Texte du rabat

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. 

Contenu

I.

Invocation

Heritage Language

Origin Story

Transit

Homecoming, ft. Free Dates

When I Wake

Strays

On Form & Matter

How the Dream Ends

II.

Notes on Touch

Now that You’re Gone

Requiem for the Blue-Headed Morning

Ode to Crying at the Supermarket

Litany of the Right Hand

On the Last Day

Just Had to Tell Somebody

Ars Poetica

Affirmation

III.

Standing at the Window

Dream, or Poem to the Tongue

Return (the Wish)

Return (the Retelling)

Inert for Days the Living Shadows

On Sisterhood

Come From

Return (the Etymologies)

Learning to Write in Arabic

IV.

parable of the aleph

parable of the three sisters

parable of the three cousins

parable of broken bones

parable of the field

parable of thanks

parable of sound & grammar

parable of sharing

parable of the eye in the throat

parable as ars poetica

parable of water & mothers

parable of the monostich

V.

Arab American Syntax

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Colophon