Invasive species

If poetry is a history of the people, Invasive species is a critical chronicle of our times. Marwa Helal’s work uncovers the personal toll of policies and language derived in exceedingly white and oppressive vacuums. Helal unflinchingly delivers a combustible amalgam of docupoetics, memoir and formal innovation that enacts the heartache of longing for rest in an unwelcoming land—a land where no one truly sees you yet everyone knows you’re there. This debut is a brilliant light that exposes the rusty apparatus of the colonizer’s toolbox while deepening the ongoing conversation around immigration, boundary and human rights.—AIREA D MATTHEWS

“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.”

Inventive. Undomesticated. Invasive species is a lively reworking of English, its deadly syntax of interrogation, of interview, questionnaire, cubicle, and cartography through a “beast of no nation.” Written of distance, in displacement, Helal’s poems require a new language, a language she builds nimbly, steadily. The result is gorgeous and gutting, rising to its own invocation, “let every letter represent a human standing in protest,” inviting us to rise as well.—SOLMAZ SHARIF

Marwa Helal voyages across borders of genre, form, and faith to deliver us beyond simple citizenship and into a higher understanding of our leaving note dreams. These poems are travelin’ papers—inventive, hard fought, sweat swollen passports into an America that bristles with hope through the same mouth that curses it’s home-grown. This is the arrival of a poet whose work huddles you in like a small and human shelter, squares you by the shoulder, looks you in the eye until you find yourself saying it with her—i’ve grown tired of keeping a safe distance.—TYEHIMBA JESS