Invasive species

March 1, 2019

With her first full-length collection, BOMB Magazine Biennal Contest winner Helal gives us a deep look into her search for a homeland--a long and roundabout journey that takes her from Egypt to America--scored with equal measures of pain, ambivalence, and determination. Here are the places and pieces of her story, the voices of the people who aided or slowed her journey--all registered by a wise eye and recorded in a kaleidoscope of forms that include poems, essay, letters, reportage, diary entries, and news clippings. The collection is a moving contrast to daily news coverage of immigration that never rises above partisan politics: "The dilemma of my disorientation is this: sometimes. When I'm driving through the tunnel on Geary Boulevard-under Masonic Avenue-I look at the fluorescent lights overhead and feel sure that I'll find Cairo on the other side. I step hard on the gas like a child who believes she can dig her way to China." Helal cites the "uncertain certainty" of this feeling, which pervades the book. VERDICT As the book jacket promises, "The result is gorgeous and gutting, rising to its own invocation."--Iris S. Rosenberg, New York

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2019
This ambitious, groundbreaking book of poetry is the first full-length collection from poet and journalist Helal, who arrived in the U.S. from Egypt as a child and has experienced firsthand the violent policing of migration. Helal's incisive lyrics cut to the core of persistent issues and explode boundaries between genres, combining sparse new forms with newspaper scans, blank maps, scholarly abstracts, and official correspondence. Centered around a long hybrid section called Immigration as a Second Language, Helal's collection blends verse and prose, memoir and reportage to recount the troubled passage from Egypt, through customs, and back again, a process that requires breathing human beings to define themselves through bureaucracies over and over again. Footnotes and citations complicate the relationship between author, text, and audience, as the book defiantly refuses to categorize itself: journalism is the work of the sleeping. poetry is the work of the dreaming. Helal has succeeded in generating poetry that is uniquely African, Arabic, and American. Highly recommended, together with Fatimah Asghar's If They Come for Us (2018) and Solmaz Sharif's Look (2016).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)