[10/15/26] Handal, Nathalie: Roma Roam

Nathalie Handal's ninth collection, Roma Roam, chronicles an unraveling after the discovery of a lover's betrayals. These bold poems explore power, freedom, water, memory, and "how / we hold history in our splitting bodies." The speaker opens herself to the opacity of human connections where "passion can be a seafarer, / a daily resurrection" and "faithfulness / a long hesitation." Who—or what—do we betray when we roam other bodies? What roles do history, religion, art, and culture play in our infidelities? Rome stands as a crossroads of Mediterranean migration and diaspora—a symbolic center where cultures and civilizations interact and transform one another. What happens when the past and present, the city and the lover, truth and falsehood collide? Roma Roam offers a startling way of fathoming the enigmatic world—and our tenuous belonging within it. Wild, sexy, visionary, and unpredictable, the collection insists on desire as both rupture and revelation.

Nathalie Handal is described as a "contemporary Orpheus." She has lived on four continents and is the author of more than ten award-winning books, including Life in a Country Album, winner of the Palestine Book Award; The Republics, winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. Handal is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Fondazione di Venezia, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, and the Africa Institute, among others. She is a professor at New York University-AD, and writes the column "The City and the Writer" for Words Without Borders.

"Roma Roam marks yet another rebirth for Nathalie Handal—a poet who defies classification, is hard to confine to a single geography or generation, and whose next work can never be anticipated. In this deeply captivating collection, Handal emerges as a poet at the height of her creativity. Beneath this lyric vitality lie a profound wisdom and depth that link Rome to Bethlehem—the besieged town to which Handal returns again and again, gently reminding us of the story of the world we inhabit, from its very beginnings." — Najwan Darwish

"In these beautiful poems of physical passion, Nathalie Handal gives her heart not to her lovers, but to the city of Rome, its past and its present. Also, to the sea and to her life's many voyages, and despite its music of exile, Handal ignites Roma Roam with a desire to desire, to go, to love, and to quench a poet's thirst for life in spite of her life's loss and wreckage." — Valzhyna Mort

"Roma Roam is a moving book that serves as a window to the self and the world. It's a book you fall into, as if under a spell, where the city becomes the body, the body the city—so full of ache, sensual and evocative. Love, like empires, comes to an end; Nathalie Handal lifts Rome's skirt and invites us to roam her streets as we map her heart toward healing. Truly beautiful." — Angie Cruz

"Nathalie Handal's latest collection explores a city and a lover that stretch through time in a constant tension between discovery and remembrance, longing and loss." — Elisa Biagini