|
Yasmine Alwan writes short stories that are packed with information, observations of slight, unimportant, daily transactions of urban life. As this compounds, the reader is given a subtle, residual portrait of the narrator as maker, thinker, eccentric. - Nancy Shaver
In Yasmine's work, special terrain is interrior, cued by sensation. There's an alertness as jumpng out of one's skin. - Leslie Scalapino
In her Untitled pieces, Yasmine Alwan reinvents the notion of the flaneur. Her wanderer immerses herself in the collisions of the city and the disjunctivens of everyday life, given contemporary form to the drama of exile and assimilation. - Micheal Brenson
Elsewhere Yasmine Alwan
…the speakers in these mostly untitled pieces are nondescript and take a back seat to the action being performed: the act of looking into contemporary society with all its confusion, cacophony and isolation…
As an unknown speaker says in “Untitled 10”
I had forgotten which direction was north. I came into the room and had forgotten where the bathroom was and by extension, the name of the street outside the open door which was white with light. This is unusual. Even in a room without windows, I know the direction I face. If I were a cat whose humans moved to another state I would be able to walk back, even if no one knew or fed me..
The fact that the speaker(s) of these poems go unnamed ungendered and dislocated from all but a few basic facts is .. important… By keeping a speaker’s identity vague, Alwan makes another profound point about contemporary living – that identities can be fluid.. By stripping her speakers of identity, Alwan makes them every (wo)man and their experiences every (wo)mans. Rarely have I encountered a poet who has done something quite like this, or quite so succinctly.
Alwan’s writing is a perfect example of the qualities that make prose poetry/flash fiction among my favorite things to read: a narrative that tells a story through image and suggestion without sacrificing its structure. Those readers who enjoy the heights to which this form can aspire should definitely pick up Elsewhere.
Reviewer JoSelle Vanderhooft pedmagazine@carolina.rr.com The Pedestal Magazine. |