VOLO

by Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal’s Volo goes on a voyage to the heart of death and asks ruminative questions born from war and “Who dies? Who gets to survive?”; “When we walked away / did the sun’s rays on the bench / bend the beauty of the world?”; “How else can / we liberate / what’s been burning / for centuries?”; “What do we find / at the edge of the last gaze / of the heart?” Traveling over continents, from the Mediterranean to New York, over nearly a century of time, traversing the body of freedom and erotic resistances, she returns to poems for resurrection through her litterae to H.D. and Allen “Death’s stubborn—it never rests. Maybe that’s how it stops suffering,” or “Maybe we will fall into the sea, forgetting that love is a longer voyage than life.” These poems are an act of radical empathy and connection.

36 pages, perfect

Published October 1, 2022

About the author

Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Arab world. Described as “a Renaissance figure,” Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Kumunyakaa writes, “This cosmopolitan voice belongs to the human family, and it luxuriates in crossing necessary borders.” Her most recent books include the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía, which Alice Walker lauds as “poems of depth and weight and the sorrowing song of longing and resolve,” and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the 2011 Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, which The New York Times says is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” Handal is the editor of the groundbreaking classic The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, and co-editor of the W.W. Norton landmark anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, both Academy of American Poets bestsellers. Her most recent plays have been produced at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Bush Theatre and Westminster Abbey, London. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, winner of the 2011 Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, and Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award, among other honors. She is a professor at Columbia University and part of the Low-Residency MFA Faculty at Sierra Nevada College.

She writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.

Reviews

[Megan E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was part of my Palestine poetry book of the month club. A very quick read, with some great lines in it.

[Razan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We don’t seem to understand that after war is when we see war.” 🕳️