About the Author

Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Her recent poetry books include the flash collection The Republics, winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excelle

Reviews

"Handal's newest collection is an ambitious work that looks back at Spanish poet Federico García Lorca's 1940 classic, Poet in New York. Handal says she recreates "Lorca's journey in reverse," by narrating her journey through Spain. Accompanied by comprehensive clarifying notes and a travelogue, Handal's collection resonates with a scholarly understanding of Spain's religious and linguistic influences."
--Publishers Weekly

"If writing draws us closer to the Other, a voice so lucid as that of Nathalie Handal becomes a necessity. A perspective such as hers allows for interpreting what transforms, remains, and unites. Poet in Andalucía will be one of the most talked about poetry books of 2012 and beyond."
--Yolanda Castaño

"Nathalie Handal's brilliant new volume of poetry, Poet in Andalucía--about Spain, about the Middle East, about shared destinies and hopes--touches me deeply: it reminds us of what's inconsolable, of what's multiple, of what's irreducible, and what's simultaneous."
--Rattapallax Magazine

"Love and Strange Horses . . . trembles with belonging (and longing)."
--New York Times

"Her work is a brilliant elegance."
--Afaa Michael Weaver

"Poems of depth and weight, and the sorrowing song of longing and resolve."
--Alice Walker

"These poems make a beautiful reality for the poet, and for us, which is truer than mortar and brick. It's with startling force that Handal builds an architecture for the wanderer, and so makes true the belief that the life of the mind may be a waking dream but it's the place we finally live. In her displacement, Handal's inward tone is of grieving, but the consequence of writing about it, and writing with such fervor, is that cities are created where we can visit."
--Exemplars

"This cosmopolitan voice belongs to the human family, and it luxuriates in crossing necessary borders."
--Yusef Komunyakaa on Love and Strange Horses