The University of Arkansas Press announces the forthcoming publication of Like We Still Speak by Danielle Badra, winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.
Conversation and memory are at the heart of Danielle Badra’s Like We Still Speak, winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. In her elegiac and formally inventive debut, Badra carries on talking with the sister and father she has lost, often setting her words alongside theirs and others’ in polyphonic poems that can be read in multiple directions. Badra invites the reader to engage in this communal space where she investigates inheritance, witnessing, intimacy, and survival.
“This is a deeply spiritual book,” write series editors Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara in the preface, “all the more so because of its clarity and humility. Yet, we cannot walk away from the addictive command that so many of these poems ask us to follow: to read them along plural paths whose order changes while their immeasurable spirit remains unbound. Each poem is a singular vessel—of narratives, embodiments that correspond with memories, memories that recollect passion. . . . Like We Still Speak is a sanctum. Inside it, we are enthralled by beauty, consoled by light, sustained by making.”
Danielle Badra is a queer Arab American poet who was raised in Michigan and currently resides in Virginia, where she received an MFA from George Mason University. Like We Still Speak is her first book.
Like We Still Speak will be published in October. The paperback will be $16.95.