Invasive species

Reviews / Votes

"Marwa Helal has lived, not always by her own choice, both in Egypt and in America, belonging to both countries and to neither: "I have been missing home my entire life," she writes. In the same way, Helal's first and often stellar book belongs to many categories, and to none. It contains prose and verse; polemic and introspection; remixed pop lyrics and pellucid memoir; straightforward narration and constellated word games. The volume shows her powers-and her amply justified anger-in most of those forms."-Stephanie Burt, The New York Times

"Candid and confident about its ecosystems of influence, at times wildly omnivorous and polylingual, purposefully pedestrian at others, the lyrical avatar of Invasive species is one whose existential impulse seems to be rabid availability-to the poet's multitude of peoples and places-negotiated crossways by a slick, uppercutting investment in infiltration rather than naturalization, divergence (not 'diversity'), and didacticism as a form of information smuggling."-Justin Phillip Reed, Adroit

"Physical, psycho-spiritual, and linguistic displacement form a nexus of poetic lines that course through this restless, memoiristic, and deeply felt debut from Helal. The book opens and closes with sections of short, plainspoken poems and blocks of runaway, breathless, form-shifting prose texts. Meanwhile, the core hinges on an abecedarian mini-memoir of Helal's family emigration from Egypt to the U.S., and her subsequent travels back and forth as she navigates 912.5 days of a dehumanizing and bureaucratic visa process to remain in 'A country that fakes left but passes a hard right.' Much of the collection takes place in cars, airports, waiting rooms; in dreams and songs; and in inventively reworked immigration documents. In this latter form, Helal reverses expectations (and syntax) and deflects the unidirectional flow of state authority with a biting sense of humor that jumps from threat to cartoonish mockery to near despair, her only constant a dead-aim of purpose: 'these motherfuckers have a green card lottery while refugee babies wash up drowned at sea.' Drawing on influences as disparate as June Jordan, DJ Khaled, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics, Helal finds in poetry something that goes beyond resistance or balm, and might even approach hope."-Publishers Weekly

"This ambitious, groundbreaking book of poetry is the first full-length collection from poet and journalist Helal, who arrived in the U.S. from Egypt as a child and has experienced firsthand the violent policing of migration. Helal's incisive lyrics cut to the core of persistent issues and explode boundaries between genres, combining sparse new forms with newspaper scans, blank maps, scholarly abstracts, and official correspondence. Centered around a long hybrid section called 'Immigration as a Second Language,' Helal's collection blends verse and prose, memoir and reportage to recount the troubled passage from Egypt, through customs, and back again, a process that requires breathing human beings to define themselves through bureaucracies over and over again. Footnotes and citations complicate the relationship between author, text, and audience, as the book defiantly refuses to categorize itself: 'journalism is the work of the sleeping. poetry is the work of the dreaming.' Helal has succeeded in generating poetry that is uniquely African, Arabic, and American. Highly recommended, together with Fatimah Asghar's If They Come for Us (2018) and Solmaz Sharif's Look (2016)."-Diego Baez, ALA Booklist

"Anger courses through this urgent new publication from Helal, which makes potently unconventional formal choices-including footnotes and citations, introducing the Arabic right-to-left and left-to-right approach to line-reading-to bolster its exploration of the immigrant and the 'other.'"-David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly

"This new collection, which defies borders and genres, will show you how to break apart the bureaucracy of daily life (and omnipresent regimes) like a green live thing breaks open old pavement."-Gala Mukomolova, Oprah Magazine

"Here, and elsewhere, movements we're taught to think impossible become manifest. Our minds are not borderless-we are saturated with the language of the state-but our imaginations can begin to warp the lines."-Spencer Quong, The Paris Review

"A poet with a master's in creative nonfiction, a bachelor's degree in international studies and journalism, and a passion for biology, Helal works the threads of her former aspirations, writing in one poem that 'journalism is the work of the sleeping. poetry is the work of the dreaming.'"-Sophia Steinert-Evoy, The Believer

"But Invasive species also reimagines the conventions we have come to expect from poetry. It's as if Helal proposes that, in this instance too, we should re-examine the confines of definition and the rules that restrict belonging.-Rigoberto Gonzalez, On The Seawall

"Helal pushes against artifice, or perhaps more accurately, she seems most interested in what happens when the fourth wall dissolves-when writer and audience actually see each other, eye to eye."-Irene P. Mathieu, Muzzle Magazine

"Complete with meticulous footnotes, a person unfamiliar with this Orwellian labyrinth can get a real education here in painful thinginess: white vans, what color a green card actually is and which versions are valid, tracking and grouping systems, the poet's hatred of embassies."-Miller Oberman, Constant Critic

"Helal pulls out the receipts-shows you the form codes and federal regulation sections so you can read this alien jargon yourself."-Danilo Machado, The Brooklyn Rail

"Invasive species is rife with questions, interviews, and interrogations like this one, all serving to put the reader in the Kafkaesque position of fearful, beleaguered responder . . . In recognizing that home is never stable, total, or trustworthy, Helal erects a new home in the movement of alphabets the sure, progressive spine of A to B to C."-Jay Deshpande, Kenyon Review

"What might seem at first like a path through tedious bureaucratic paperwork becomes, thanks to Helal's analysis, augmentations, and translations, a clear and forthright account of cruelties and dehumanizations designed to protect white supremacy and assert imperial power."-Kathryn Nuernberger




"Marwa Helal voyages across borders of genre, form, and faith to deliver us beyond simple citizenship and into a higher understanding of our leaving note dreams. These poems are travelin' papers-inventive, hard fought, sweat swollen passports into an America that bristles with hope through the same mouth that curses it's home-grown. This is the arrival of a poet whose work huddles you in like a small and human shelter, squares you by the shoulder, looks you in the eye until you find yourself saying it with her-i've grown tired of keeping a safe distance."-Tyehimba Jess

"If poetry is a history of the people, Invasive species is a critical chronicle of our times. Marwa Helal's work uncovers the personal toll of policies and language derived in exceedingly white and oppressive vacuums. Helal unflinchingly delivers a combustible amalgam of docupoetics, memoir and formal innovation that enacts the heartache of longing for rest in an unwelcoming land-a land where no one truly sees you yet everyone knows you're there. This debut is a brilliant light that exposes the rusty apparatus of the colonizer's toolbox while deepening the ongoing conversation around immigration, boundary and human rights."-Airea D Matthews

"Inventive. Undomesticated. Invasive species is a lively reworking of English, its deadly syntax of interrogation, of interview, questionnaire, cubicle, and cartography through a 'beast of no nation.' Written of distance, in displacement, Helal's poems require a new language, a language she builds nimbly, steadily. The result is gorgeous and gutting, rising to its own invocation, 'let every letter represent a human standing in protest,' inviting us to rise as well."-Solmaz Sharif