Lemon Effigies by Zaina Alsous
Winner of the 2017 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award
In Zaina Alsous’ poems, the lush, vivid details of the worlds’ existence — its poppies, its finches, its lemon yellows, the indigo minerals on an eyelid — guarantee pleasure’s interwoven-ness through the pain of non-return and the labor of abolition. If we forget the bulldozed cinemas of Palestine and the “milky sighs” of the muses, we lose the very memory of freedom. Alsous’ poetry is a stylish woman entering the English language with a bomb in her purse."
— Laura Jaramillo, author of Material Girl
Here is the myth as Arable. Poems to be read and read again. A work that demands your attention and returns your gaze without once looking away.
— Marwa Helal, author of I Am Made to Leave I Am Made to Return