CPS congratulates Nathalie Handal on her forthcoming poetry collection, Life in a Country Album (University of Pittsburgh Press).

Life in a Country Album
From migrations to pop culture, loss to la dérive, Life in a Country Album is a soundtrack of the global cultural landscape—borders and citizenship, hybrid identities and home, freedom and pleasure. It’s a vast and moving look at the world, at what home means, and the ways we coexist in an increasingly divided world. These poems are about the dialects of the heart—those we are incapable of parting from, and those that are largely forgotten. Life in a Country Album is a vital book for our times. With this beautiful, epic collection, Nathalie Handal affirms herself as one of our most diverse and important contemporary poets.

PRESS
In odes to the Francophone diaspora and Mediterranean crisis or in vibrant celebration of American complexity, Nathalie Handal illuminates the luxuriance and longing of deracination. A contemporary Orpheus, she hymns our most urgent and ineffable truths; her poems sing.—Claire Messud, author of The New York Times Bestseller The Emperor's Children

Love in a Country Album reminds me of the irresistible spare stylization of French New Wave cinema. I love how the desire and longing running through these poems reaches me via the collections many voices and cityscapes, and--most poignantly--via the borders between bodies, nations and hearts. Absolutely gorgeous. —Tracy K. Smith, US Poet Laureate

I love this book. It’s simply poetry that doesn’t quit moving. It tells a story. It’s water, it shimmers. —Eileen Myles, legendary poet and Lambda Literary Award winner