It’s quite appropriate, as we celebrate National Poetry Month, that 1455 features Danielle Badra and her award-winning collection LIKE WE STILL SPEAK for the April installment of our Author Series. As always, this event was recorded and you can enjoy (and share!) the video, below.
By way of introduction, let’s end any suspense: I enthusiastically recommend Danielle’s book not only because it’s remarkable writing, but it’s timely and crucial in all the right ways. To be certain, the themes of loss, grief, recovery, and survival abound (it’s at once a deeply personal collection, but –like the best writing– speaks to universal and relatable themes); it also explores issues like identity, gender, and duality. In other words, this is a deceptively deep and exhaustive cycle of poems, yet they are accessible and generous.
Not a particularly original thought, but worth repeating: the highest calling of art, arguably, is the way it preserves our shared humanity, which includes elegizing loved ones no longer with us. On a variety of levels, LIKE WE STILL SPEAK does exactly these things. Not only does Danielle provide reflections on mortality and what survivors of grief struggle with, her work might serve as a guide for those not yet acquainted with this type of loss.
During our discussion, I mention to Danielle that there are more than a handful of indelible lines in her poems I will now carry in my heart. Perhaps the single line that I find at once devastating and redemptory is this: Let’s stay hurtable rather than hard. Not only do I adore this, as observation and provocation, but also as mission statement (as a writer, as a man). This, to me, distills the essence of art-making and also the aspiration for living a more peaceful, evolved life.
As always, it’s our pleasure to partner with D.C.’s historic Potter’s House and we encourage you to support independent booksellers by procuring your copies of LIKE WE STILL SPEAK via their website.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Conversation and memory are at the heart of Danielle Badra’s Like We Still Speak, winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. In her elegiac and formally inventive debut, Badra carries on talking with the sister and father she has lost, often setting her words alongside theirs and others’ in polyphonic poems that can be read in multiple directions. Badra invites the reader to engage in this communal space where she investigates inheritance, witnessing, intimacy, and survival.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Danielle Badra is a queer Arab-American poet. She was raised in Michigan and currently resides in Virginia. Her debut poetry collection, Like We Still Speak, was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and is published through the University of Arkansas Press. Her poems have appeared in Guesthouse, Cincinnati Review, Mizna, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Split This Rock, Duende, and elsewhere.
