Handful of Salt

About Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse received her MFA at Warren Wilson and MEd from the University of Virginia, then taught at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). She is currently a Research Fellow at AUIS and a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Words Without Borders, and online at the Poetry Society of America.

About Darya Abdul-Karim Ali Najm, Mewan Nahro Said Sofi, Barbara Goldberg

Darya Abdul-Karim Ali Najm graduated from AUIS with a major in International Studies and a minor in English Literature. She is a marketing manager and plans to resume studies of literature and politics.

Mewan Nahro Said Sofiis a Masters candidate in Management of Governance Networks at Erasmus University. She was born in Iran, spent most of her childhood in the Netherlands, and majored at AUIS in International Studies.

Barbara Goldberg received her MFA from American University, has authored five volumes of poetry, won the Felix Pollak Poetry Award, and translated two poetry collections and four anthologies from the Hebrew. She serves as Series Editor for The Word Works International Editions.

Praise for Handful of Salt

“Women and Kurdistan,” Kajal Ahmed writes: “how similar we are, how/ strange”—and how fortunate English-speaking readers are to have this selection of her poems, expertly translated and edited by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse and her Kurdish co-translators. Handful of Salt is a superb introduction to the work of an acclaimed Kurdish poet, whose chronicles of her walk in the sun mirror the complicated and tragic history of her people, in diverse forms and voices: “we’re soil and soil, fire and fire,/ water and water, how heavy/ it is.” But what a light these poems cast on everyone and everything.
—Christopher Merrill, author of Boat

These poems by Kajal Ahmad are intoxications, sensual rumblings from the core of a woman’s fire, burning through homeland and body, casting off time and space, sense and structure, unveiling, opening a new landscape, a new territory beyond logic or right and wrong. These poems are revolutions of language, a bursting of feminine power, exquisite turnings of words towards life in death and death in life. A stunning and revelatory collection of poems.
—Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues