The Republics

by Nathalie Handal

“The Republics is a massively brilliant new work, a leap in literature we have not seen. It’s gripping, harrowing, and at times horrific while its form paradoxically is fresh, luscious, and original. Bypassing pity and transforming pain into language Handal stars. She has recorded like Alice Walker, Paul Celan, John Hershey, and Carolyn Forché some of the worst civilization has offered humankind and somehow made it art.”—Sapphire

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published March 6, 2015

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

[World Literature Today]

"In The Republics, Nathalie Handal’s ethical-political consciousness suffuses every poem, although she rarely speaks directly from her own perspective having lived in Haiti, preferring instead to amplify voices of those living in Hispaniola, as they speak of histories, traumas, and of Haiti’s devastation by the 2010 earthquake. They speak, too, of their survival." - Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

This book was reviewed in the May/August 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Not Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prose poetry. Paperback.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are undoubtable flashes of brilliance in this book, but there are some that get lost in the disjointed language that she works with. A good read, but I wouldn't recommend it if you're new to this kind of poetry.