This House, My Bones (Willow Books/Aquarius Press)
Please join us for a very special reading from author, poet, playwright and co-founder of VONA/Voices, Elmaz Abinader!
The conversation with history is witnessed by the earth and etches the collisions on its body—every rock and road, riverbed and meadow hold the marks of migrations, escapes, exiles, alienations, aging and evolutions. In This House, My Bones, the body and the earth exchange their positions and perspectives. The memories of war are on the skin as well as on the mesa, the exile is written in dust and cells. Through mining experience of occupation, dislocation, and aging, I created poems where the body and the earth examine their bruises.
The poems were influenced by the words of Adrienne Rich, by the poet's experiences in Palestine, and from her own meditation of the DNA of history and its shifts.
Praise for The House, My Bones
"In poems of grace and a searing fire, Elmaz Abinader negotiates love, yearning, hope, memory, resistance, injustice and death and weaves an uneasy but authentic hope that illuminates the path to a true redemption. A stunning collection."--Chris Abani, author of Sanctificum and The Secret History of Las Vegas
"A somber clarity weaves this lovely work. Perhaps Abinader’s lines express it best: “How many times can your heart break?/ How many times is writing a surgery?” Yes, a mourning rises from these pages. But wrapped with prayer and hymn, a tender morning rises from these pages.--Ruth Forman, author of Prayers like Shoes and We Are the Young Magicians
"Elmaz Abinader is a poet fiercely committed to the world’s beauty, to history, to lost voices and the people she loves. Her witness is “a drawing’s wisdom,” her 100 year old Lebanese father’s memories, connections between Pennsylvania and Abu Dis. Like the first cup of coffee, her words awaken us to cardamom and memory, to reasons to celebrate amid the world’s injustice and travails. This House, My Bones: read it and be blessed." --David Mura, author of The Last Incantations and The Colors of Desire
"Elmaz Abinader reappears with the fluid truth, a straight line to the soul, the storm in your throat. Her new collection sings deep into the bone marrow of what we fear losing: our witness vein, the maps that help us recoup what we misplace in the forgetting, and the dead who carry our names. This House, My Bones blesses us with a new language for the anatomy of our silences.--Willie Perdomo, author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
"This House, My Bones" is a gorgeously scripted chronicle that probes the collective heart and the countries we inhabit when we dare to speak outloud. There's an insistent rhythm in these stanzas, a lyricism of light and lineage stamped with the undeniable signature of a poet at the height of her craft. Savor these poems, and be lifted by their music. --Patricia Smith, Author of Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshal Poetry Prize
Elmaz Abinader is a poet, memoirist, playwright and novelist. Elmaz won the 2000 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry award for the poetry collection, In the Country of My Dreams …. She was also awarded a Goldies Award for Literature, as well as two Drammies (Oregon’s Drama award) for her three-act one-woman show, Country of Origin. Elmaz most recently performed Country of Origin at the Kennedy Center and has toured several countries with this play and two others: Ramadan Moon and 32 Mohammeds. Elmaz’s work has been widely anthologized, most recently in The New Anthology of American Poetry, Vol. 3 and The Colors of Nature. Her first memoir, Children of the Roojme, a Family’s Journey from Lebanon, chronicles three generations of immigrants battling dislocation and tradition. Elmaz has been a Fulbright Senior Fellow to Egypt, taught for the Palestine Writing Workshop and a resident at the El Gouna Writing Residency on the Red Sea, Cansarrat, Montalvo and MacDowell Colony. Elmaz is one of the founders of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, (VONA/Voices), now in its 15th year providing workshops for writers of color. She is also a creative writing professor at Mills College and a fitness instructor at the Oakland Y.
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