Mechanics’ Hall & Back Cove Books present a conversation centered on janan alexandra’s debut poetry collection

In her debut poetry collection, COME FROM, janan alexandra weaves from English into Arabic, exploring the joint projects of longing and belonging. Part love song for the speaker’s mother, part grief song for ongoing postcolonial loss, this book reaches for, around, underneath, and through language—feeling for its limits and possibilities.

Drawing on both narrative and lyric impulses, alexandra invites readers into a world bristling with family, memory, home, and inheritance—all in the wake of dislocation and fracture. In one section of the book, we follow the speaker “back home” after years of separation; later, we encounter a series of parables in the form of an Arabic abecedarian, through which the speaker recovers parts of her mother tongue. Here, alexandra probes the gifts and wounds of language, invoking personal and communal histories marked with the longue durée of empire.

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