Wholesale Pre-order: Overwintered by Elina Katrin

Elina Katrin's Overwintered is a brilliant debut collection that deftly examines the space between Syrian, Russian, and American cultures. Navigating immigration, the book moves through the fractured landscapes of memory that define the speaker's translation of place, relationships, and time: "I say sister / but it comes out / solstice / each day the longest / since I have seen you." Katrin's spare yet lush poetry illuminates the constant acclimation and evolution of language. Lilies, figs, Paskha cakes, habibi-flavored coffee, and other metaphors combine in elegant, contemporary explorations of a speaker honoring her origins while also growing into a unified, unique self. From blood and "blisters bursting across biology." From bellies' second swelling, shedding its petals, sharpening "both buds into girlthorns." Of "language without present / perfect." Of winters stripped of their nuance. Of translation at a loss. "Ya Allah," says Elina Katrin's speaker, "let there be room to feel in a language / without speaking it." In a season of endless exponentiating heat, this book returned me to still lives in November. In a time of many paradoxical emotions for our siblings in Syria, where many in diaspora are now able to return for the first time in decades, here is a poetics that gazes unflinchingly at the imperial distances underpinning our present moment: the infinity between "make me" and "useful" (as with "make me" and "spectacle") typed onto an immigration form, the death of a family member announced on Facebook, of god as a rupture "of wrinkles on my mother's forehead, exacerbated / over WhatsApp's video quality," of Trader Joe's conversations where there are more cousins than figs. Braiding in and out of forms just as deftly as through languages, I am truly mesmerized by Overwintered. Elina Katrin is simply one of the most exciting rising poets, and one of the most caring and brilliant practitioners of multilingual poetics, alive today. -George Abraham, author of When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America "There are punctures in me only Cyrillic can fill" writes Elina Katrin in this beautiful poetry collection about living between countries, languages, negotiating what it means to belong. Family history, translation, memory, and displacement intertwine as poems explore the emotional consequences of leaving one homeland, inheriting another, and building a life in a third place, while carrying the grief continents. "How many borders will it take to settle?" this poet asks. Indeed. What makes this book inimitable is how it considers inheritance, not just of grief but also humor, food, romance, and moments of wonder. And as pages turn so many marvels come into view. If there is a celebration there is the slaughtered wedding lamb suspended by its legs nearby. Smile will be worn like a spear and the human body too will become a nature morte. All of whi