The Republics

"The Republics is a startling piece of work. It's tight and lyrical and surprising and, when it needs to be, heartbreaking. Nathalie Handal's signature comes through loud and clear. It's one of the most inventive books I've read by one of today's most diverse writers."

These 'flash reportages' by Nathalie Handal offer us new ways to think about both poetry and journalistic documentation. A dialogue of observers as they share a voice for the space of the poem. I love how it is the constant questioning that seems to hold the narratives together. Entrancing.

Handal's ethical-political consciousness suffuses every poem, although she rarely speaks directly from her own perspective as a native-born Haitian, preferring instead to amplify voices of those living in Hispaniola, as they speak of histories, traumas, and of Haiti's devastation by the 2010 earthquake. They speak, too, of their survival. . . . Inside a masterful poetics, Handal's ethical consciousness directs our gaze toward suffering and yet 'holds fast to the possibility of that which is better.'

Particularly inventive, as Handal uses a variety of monologues, narrative or prose poetry, and 'flash fiction' to explore questions of home and personal relationships, while also considering (or reconsidering) her relationship to the island where she was born.

Nathalie Handal is a singular creature: An international nomad whose work explores the innermost quadrants of the self and has a genius for letting all voices, however discordant, be heard. This is poetry of the most original and rigorous kind.

The Republics is a massively brilliant new work, a leap in literature we have not seen. It's gripping, harrowing, and at times horrific while its form paradoxically is fresh, luscious, and original. Bypassing pity and transforming pain into language Handal stars. She has recorded like Alice Walker, Paul Celan, John Hershey, and Carolyn Forche some of the worst civilization has offered humankind and somehow made it art.