With this debut collection, Elina Kumra signals the arrival of a striking new literary voice that evokes an astonishing range of lived experience. In each of these poems and stories, she gets to the heart of the human predicament, laying bare its myriad truths at root. Here are tales of identity and belonging, resilience and resignation, sudden upheaval and brutal dispossession. Stories that speak to the migrant experience in its full plenitude and the strange dislocations that arise whenever we're forced to start again from scratch.
Combining modern myth and concrete fact, Elina Kumra gives magical realism a timely upgrade within these pages. All of the maddening complexities of the present moment are on vivid display here, rendered in a fluid writing style that captures its dangerous cross-currents and savage breaks. From Gaza to Damascus to Los Angeles, the reader is offered windows into worlds that all too often escape our attention. Like all writers of conscience, Elina Kumra spares no effort in bringing them to light.