Lives of Rain: Poems

by Nathalie Handal

SHORT LISTED FOR THE AGNES LYNCH STARRETT POETRY PRIZE/THE PITT POETRY SERIES “In The Lives of Rain, Nathalie Handal has brought forth a work of radical displacement and uncertainty, moving continent to continent, giving voice to Palestinians of the diaspora in the utterance of one fiercely awake and compassionate, who, against warfare, occupation and brutality offers her native language, olives, wind, a herd of sheep or a burning mountain, radio music, a butterfly’s gaze… Handal is a poet of deftly considered paradoxes and reversals, sensory evocations and mysteries left beautifully unresolved. Hers is a language seared by history and marked by the impress of extremity; so it is suffused with a rare species of wisdom.” –From the Foreword by Carolyn Forché

Genres: Poetry

208 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 2005

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

[Imen Benyoub · Rating 4 out of 5]

there you stand
between the dream of two gazelles,*breathlessly
questioning the poem

poem
dressed in olive branches and cracked happiness,
surrounded by seasons of sleepless nights staring
at the dusty walls of cities we have lost

the lives of rain is a book of exile and wandering,geographically and emotionally.In it are wars,loves,scars,ancestors.In it are olive trees,lemon trees,weddings,music,fear.In it are English,French,Arabic,Spanish..Alice Ostriker

as much i enjoyed this book i want to thank you My lady Sharon for this gorgeous gift..some poems like "the stranger in me".."detained".."blue hours" are excellent,read them more than once..adored the switch of languages in the poems especially the Arabic parts..a hommage to Palestine through "Gaza city".."Bethlehem".."regrets in Galilee"..

can't wait to start poet in Andalucia..<3

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best poems in Handal's first collection are exellent: "Bethlehem," "The Combatant and I," "The Uncertainty of Fear," "Detained," "Caribe in Nueva York," "Blues Hours," and "Strangers Inside Me." Writing from her complex experience as multi-lingual exile, Handal's at her best when excavating the psychological dimensions of estrangment, especially the difficulties of loving across chasms of distrust, uncertainty, radical fluidity. Some of the more public and political poems slip into predictable gesture, but I'll definitely be reading her two more recent volumes.

[Sara Saab · Rating 2 out of 5]

With the exception of a small handful of powerful pieces, "The Hanging Hours," "Orphans of Night," "I Never Made it to Cafe Beirut, Nor, I Heard, Did You," the language in this collection lets it down.

Handal has a tendency to end poems on a murmur, which punctures a hole in the enchantment she's building rather than cementing it.

Overall, I kept thinking that these poems would have benefited from one more revision. They're a little underdone for my taste.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

More beautiful and heart breaking than I can adequately put into words.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good. For a semester in undergrad, Nathalie Handal was one of my professors, I don't know why I had not read her work till now. I feel like so much of what she taught or how makes more sense to me now. I loved that this collection was a mix of languages, cultures, places, themes of belonging and trying to belong, all the while being the same voice. I really enjoyed this one and will continue to read her work.

[Oz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too About Poetry for me, but interesting!