We’re thrilled to share that we’ll be reading Marwa Helal’s debut full-length collection, Invasive species, forthcoming from Nightboat Books on January 1, as our November Poetry Book Club selection!
Marwa Helal’s searing politically charged poems touch on our collective humanity and build new pathways for empathy, etching themselves into memory. This work centers on urgent themes in our cultural landscape, creating space for unseen victims of discriminatory foreign (read: immigration) policy: migrants, refugees—the displaced. Helal transfers lived experiences of dislocation and relocation onto the reader by obscuring borders through language.
Marwa’s poems energize through their daring intelligence, their subversion of scripts. This extraordinary work never lets us rest in complacent reading; they teach us how to read them by refusing language’s imperialistic nature through swerves, reversals, code-switching, code formation, and formal innovations. An electrifying, wildly inventive work.” – Jenny Xie
To receive your early copy of Invasive species, read along with the Poetry Book Club, and participate in our exclusive chat with Marwa Helal, subscribe to the Rumpus Poetry Book Club by October 20!