come from

Reviews / Votes

"If I
were lucky enough to introduce you to janan alexandra's marvelous first
book, come from, by which I really mean if I were to tell you about
it what I love...I might start with feeling, how the poems themselves feel
yes-recklessly, holleringly, precisely-but also how much in the poems there is
to feel, to touch; how thick with the palpable world, how in it they are, and
of it, how rich with land and people, with elderberries and ankles and eyes and
ferns and saplings and oarlocks and cornflowers and hands and throats and
tongues and the plush ears of donkeys and the dreams of bats...I cannot explain
it, but the poems, not only their sorrow, but their glee and their wonder and
their tumult and their goddamn too, they somehow open their arms to us and
bring us in, they set a place and say you can be here, you can rest here, right
where you can hear the birds singing, the loves, the roots reaching as they are
through the dark, toward us, always, I love these poems how they make welcome." -Ross Gay, from the Foreword

"come from arrives, it
seems to me, in the footsteps of the cats, of the great Etel Adnan, of the worn
& sun-hot stone. Wisdom. Vision. What a dream to find this sound, to reach
& reach again for janan alexandra's brilliant, steadfast attention -
each phrase an altar of life, a route to past-language. Question, exclamation,
sorrow, memory. I am more alive to read this poet's every light & dark." -aracelis girmay, author of the black maria

"Here, janan
alexandra makes audible something ancient about poetry, that it courses through
our anatomies, through the larynx and out the mouth: 'girl makes / her tongue a
slab of meat / between rows of teeth. / th!, th!, th! : / sound of feet /
slicing through snow.' Listen to the smallest gestures of the hand on paper: in
the orthography of an aleph is an animate world wound with centuries of
violence and wonderment." -Carolina Ebeid, author of Dauerwunder, a
brief record of facts

"Quietly gorgeous, these poems awaken me. The alive of the language: 'the wind sweeps my head, suddens my wonder' ('Ars Poetica,' a perfect gem of an unrhymed sonnet). This is a book of tenderness and generosity. You may not know it, but you need 'Affirmation.' And right now we all need 'Come From' and 'Arab American Syntax'-and to consider 'When there's no ceiling left, how do we assemble the sentence?'" -Ellen Dore Watson, author of pray me stay eager