VOLO
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The emotional memory in Nathalie Handal’s Volo delves into “nerves and the skin” of the ruins of water, what it means to move through the world and stay in your body. Volo’s lingua franca is a fusion of the sea and the city. Fragments and brevity are characteristic to Handal’s body of work. Her poetics explore movement, migrations, and desire. You can hear echoes of Leonard Cohen, Fairuz, Arturo Sandoval, and her intersecting identities: Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, French, Italian, Latin American and the Caribbean reverberating from her apartment in Queens or Rome. To read Handal is to exhume life, pleasure, and the deep neon of history.
The Memory of Ruins, On Nathalie Handal’s VOLO, Aster(ix)
In these two long poems, Nathalie Handal enters into conversations with the dead, and those conversations become tribute, argument, love song, celebration. Isn't that what poetry is for? To make the dead speak, to stop time, to remind us where we came from? These are lavish, ambitious and deeply felt poems that traffic in mystery and wonder.
— Mark Wunderlich
Nathalie Handal's exquisite poems always teeter on the thin divide between presence and absence. They absorb the grief of distances and somehow, as in ancient incantations, restore us to wider space and time where nothing can be lost or disappeared. She changes the weather.
— Naomi Shihab Nye
Poet-Voyager: A Conversation with Nathalie Handal — World Literature Today
Urban Poet Nathalie Handal on Kaddish, Allen Ginsberg, and Volo — Washington Square Review
Nathalie Handal on Her First Writing Assignment from Mahmoud Darwish — Arablit & Arablit Quarterly