Solio

‘Solio—aptly named for a word whose root belongs to several world languages—means crossing, threshold, or coming to attention. This word, used in the last poem of the volume, showcases Negrouche’s repeated segue between presence and absence, observation and vision. It indicates her ability to shoulder the weight of the universe’s memory that lives in her ‘three mother tongues’. . . Her poetry reads like an unhurried act of poetic self-accomplishment.’—World Literature Today

‘Negrouche’s writing is dynamic, compelling and deeply engaged, exploring the raw facets of humanity. Solio nourishes the soul, with its inherent spirituality and musicality, and dances its way gracefully into the heart.’—Modern Poetry in Translation

‘Reading Solio is like attending a musical or theatrical performance—the reader is first and foremost a listener, learning the choreography of words repeated, distilled, amplified, and gifted back unto the world of beings and things where everything is in perpetual flux—the poet, as well as the humans and geographies she encounters.’―Los Angeles Review

‘A beautiful book, one that bears knowledge of grief and yet (or, perhaps, because of it) embraces the world.’—Praise for The Olive Trees’ Jazz and Other Poems―Ilya Kaminsky

‘In this stunning book, Negrouche and Hacker bring us poems that are exquisite in the American language to which they have been translated, but are ineffably of Maghrebi provenance, and more particularly of exile. These are poems of history and geography—in ribbons, in shreds, torn from the Algerian War of Independence and from the Arab Spring. At the centre are poems of transgressive love.’—Praise for The Olive Trees’ Jazz and Other Poems―Alicia Ostriker

‘In the lyric essay ‘Who is Speaking,’ Francophone Algerian poet Samira Negrouche imagines greater human consciousness as a poetic lifeworld in which ‘[s]ilence is a landscape and my ancestors know no borders.’ Her most recent offering in English, Solio, draws us fully into this world. Each created in collaboration, one with musicians, the other with a choreographer, the two books feature dynamic speakers whose movements of music, meditation, and improvisation resonate through Carlson’s translations, which are attuned to their interconnections of tone, prosody, form, and perspective. The poems intuitively weave together impressions of other lives: natural, distant, imagined, ancestral—even ours on the impossible side of the page. These figures inhabit worlds woven of the same psychic thread, realizing a vision of silence as a cultivated habitat for interiority, the listener woven into a world made of listening.’—Exacting Clam