my poetry book
La Syrena: Visions of a Syrian Mermaid from Space (2022) won the Diverse Voices Prize from Dzanc Books, a leading indie publisher.
In this collection, each poem flows like water on the page. The author weaves in stories و mantras و revolutionary messages و the movement of Arabic letters و the memory of Sumerian cuneiform. This book is a hybrid creature between poem-story-form that crosses genres like it crosses dimensions. In this work, you are the mermaid. You are the forever migrant, a traveler between the oceanic and the extraterrestrial, across continents and planets. You are a time traveler, and you speak many languages. You are LA SYRENA, conjuring your own space to feel free.
Praise for La Syrena:
“Banah el Ghadbanah has written a collection that is bold and elegant, formally daring, and on every page poetic. La Syrena is a true work of art by an ambitious and captivating artist.”
—Robert Lopez, author of A Better Class of People
“In this stunning collection of text and image, sprawling across the page in pulsating English, Arabic, and visual gesture, Banah Ghadbanah, a virtuoso of interlinguistic, interspatial, intertemporal, interstellar travel, brings us the voice of “A Syrian mermaid from space, miles from her original home, [who] returned to the shore with her voice and was rebirthed under the stars,” where “she gave birth to herself.” In poems that are meant to “be read out loud and tasted on your tongue” as well as “poems to be left alone on the page to rest quietly in your eyes and hands,” Ghadbanah traverses galaxies of outer and inner space, history, geography, war, migration, language, sexuality, and the dense interweave of personal and political. Moving with dizzying dexterity from pre-Islamic goddesses to political revolution to diaspora displacements to colonial violence to gender queerness to linguistic interplays that unlock worlds, her words and images insist on the multilayered realities of grief, resistance and love, the necessity of transformation, and the incandescence of life. “Our liberation is a current that cannot be stopped,” she writes. “We/the lunar in betweeners/the people they call crazy. We shake the ground open.” The currents unloosed in this book will shake the reader open as well—an opening from which many things can follow.”
—Lisa Suhair Majaj, authors of Geographies of Light
La Syrena is an ambitious work. In their breadth and scope—formally, aesthetically, conceptually, linguistically, and in so many respects—Banah el Ghadbanah’s poems will dazzle you, as they have me. They aim to impress the innermost depths of our hearts and the outermost reaches of our imaginations, and they deliver on the promise of these journeys. I have no doubt that once you go where these poems take you, you cannot return the same. And you will want others to go there with you.”
—Hayan Charara, author of These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit