"The Republics is a massively brilliant new work, a leap in literature we have not seen. It's gripping, harrowing, and at times horrific while its form paradoxically is fresh, luscious, and original. Bypassing pity and transforming pain into language Handal stars. She has recorded like Alice Walker, Paul Celan, John Hershey, and Carolyn Forché some of the worst civilization has offered humankind and somehow made it art."—Sapphire

Playwright, editor, and poet Handal's fifth collection of poetry balances what she calls 'flash reportages' with vivid lyric and image. Built out of a patchwork of powerful blocks of monologue or narrative, and threaded with Spanish and Haitian Creole, the book's texture parallels those of 'a multicolored coat,' 'a mirror of unfinished voices,' and 'a scarf tangled in sepia.' . . . The poems spring forth with a spontaneity and urgency that counterbalance the restrained flourishes of her previous work. Handal watches and waits to 'catch what aches in beauty,' telling stories of Haitians and Dominicans with searing honesty. . . . Handal artfully captures the desire, the rawness of life, and the 'misery that burns the soul' of the people she encounters.

"The Republics is a startling piece of work. It's tight and lyrical and surprising and, when it needs to be, heartbreaking. Nathalie Handal's signature comes through loud and clear. It's one of the most inventive books I've read by one of today's most diverse writers."

These 'flash reportages' by Nathalie Handal offer us new ways to think about both poetry and journalistic documentation. A dialogue of observers as they share a voice for the space of the poem. I love how it is the constant questioning that seems to hold the narratives together. Entrancing.

Handal's ethical-political consciousness suffuses every poem, although she rarely speaks directly from her own perspective as a native-born Haitian, preferring instead to amplify voices of those living in Hispaniola, as they speak of histories, traumas, and of Haiti's devastation by the 2010 earthquake. They speak, too, of their survival. . . . Inside a masterful poetics, Handal's ethical consciousness directs our gaze toward suffering and yet 'holds fast to the possibility of that which is better.'

Particularly inventive, as Handal uses a variety of monologues, narrative or prose poetry, and 'flash fiction' to explore questions of home and personal relationships, while also considering (or reconsidering) her relationship to the island where she was born.

Nathalie Handal is a singular creature: An international nomad whose work explores the innermost quadrants of the self and has a genius for letting all voices, however discordant, be heard. This is poetry of the most original and rigorous kind.

The Republics is a massively brilliant new work, a leap in literature we have not seen. It's gripping, harrowing, and at times horrific while its form paradoxically is fresh, luscious, and original. Bypassing pity and transforming pain into language Handal stars. She has recorded like Alice Walker, Paul Celan, John Hershey, and Carolyn Forche some of the worst civilization has offered humankind and somehow made it art.

Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Her recent poetry books include the flash collection The Republics, winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing, and the Arab American Book Award; critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is the author of eight plays, editor of two anthologies, and her poetry, essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, among others. Handal is the recipient of awards from The Lannan Foundation, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Fondazione di Venezia, Emily Harvey Foundation, among others. Her work brings her to audiences globally. She is a professor at Columbia University, and writes the literary travel column “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders magazine.