come from

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 forongoing postcolonial loss, this book reaches for, around, andthrough 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. 

Drawingon both narrative and lyric impulses, alexandra invites readers into a worldbristling with family, memory, home, and inheritance—all in the wake ofdislocation and fracture. In one section of the book, we follow the speaker“back home” after years of separation; later, we encounter a series of parablesin the form of an Arabic abecedarian, through which the speaker recovers partsof her mother tongue—invokingpersonal and communal histories marked with the longue durée of empire.

come from investigateswhat is deeply interior while reaching toward the world with tenderness andgenerous attention.