Lisan Al'asfourLisan Al'asfour

"Delimited with moving invocations for softness and strength, Natalie Hanna’s lisan al'asfour (the bird’s tongue) introduces a personal concept of creation around loss and matrilineage. Hanna examines her heritage as the child of a married woman compelled to immigrate from Egypt in the 1970s. The poems trace challenges of medicalization, childlessness in relation to ancestral lines, racism, loss of culture, and working in the field of law. The collection shifts through poems of mourning, to Tahrir Square, Syrian bombings, the conflict in the Gaza Strip, the Beirut explosion, and gun/police violence to Black and Indigenous communities. Finally, a series of poems that describe the schism between defining and maintaining identity, and the orientalised perceptions in others’ expectations, invite intimate and vulnerable engagement. These are poems that speak to our efforts to make sense of the worlds we construct. The sometimes graphic incidents are offered in a respectful manner that confronts atrocity, refusing the impulse to avert. Hanna’s words have a multivalence, embracing an impassioned approach to literary practice as anti-oppression practice, through the perspective of the critical self-subject."--Provided by publisher.