Guest Review: Eric Hooglund

The Lives of Rain
By Nathalie Handal
Interlink Books
Paperback, 67 pp.

These two books of poetry are by Nathalie Handal, a Palestinian woman whose life in the Diaspora includes living in cities and towns on three different continents, as well as on islands in the Caribbean. The instability of Palestinian Diasporic life show up in her long, three-part poem, The Neverfield, which scholar Lisa Suhair Majaj describes in the book’s afterword as “a personal quest for identity and belonging.” The Lives of Rain is a collection of thirty-nine poems, all of them short with the exception of the last one, Amrika. But the poems in the The Lives of Rain comprise a unified theme, one that Carolyn Forché describes in the foreword as a “radical displacement and uncertainty, moving continent to continent, giving voice to the Palestinians of the Diaspora in the utterance of one [who is] fiercely awake and compassionate.” In addition to being an accomplished poet, Handal has written numerous plays and short stories, directed theatre productions, and compiled anthologies of Arab-American Diaspora literature, Middle Eastern poetry and Arab women poets.