The Coriolis effect—from which A. D. Lauren-Abunassar’s hyperkinetic debut collection borrows its title—describes a force that deflects a mass off course. This concept is at play both formally and psychically in Coriolis, recognized in Leila Chatti’s Foreword as “a book of wanting, of lack, absence, disintegration, opacity, and yearning. . . . ‘If only I could cut out the part of me shaped like wanting,’ writes Lauren-Abunassar. At times, the thing wanted for is love. Other times: family, certainty, belonging, home, safety, wellness, wholeness, or simply for a thing to be clean. Always, these poems reveal the shape of the want by illuminating its outline.” Perhaps the speaker of these poems wants most of all to be seen, despite her reflex to deflect when she discloses a shame or trauma, often by depositing the self-revelation within rapid, teeming strings of thought. Yet as much as this speaker may be an introvert in life—“Every time someone says my name it surprises me”; “Because I am lonely, I am always shying away from the mirror”; “Today I woke up feeling / like an already said thing”—many of her utterances are exuberantly uninhibited. “Small trees live inside me,” Lauren-Abunassar admits passingly in one poem. And in another: “When I dream of myself, my mouth / blooms many hands. They reach in all / shapes and directions.”
Coriolis
$19.95
A. D. Lauren-Abunassar
106 pages, 7 × 9
978-1-68226-237-5 (paper)
November 2023
A. D. Lauren-Abunassar, an Arab American poet and writer, currently lives in New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Narrative, Rattle, Boulevard, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2020 Palette Emerging Poet Prize and a finalist for a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. She holds graduate degrees in journalism from NYU and poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
“A. D. Lauren-Abunassar’s Coriolis is the kind of poetry debut that takes an entire lifetime to build, as autobiography meets iteration and disintegration, as cryptids meet the questions of forgiveness and sacrifice, as blood meets ocean . . . This is one of the most memorable, immaculate, and singular poetry debuts I’ve ever read.”
—George Abraham, author of Birthright
“It is a strange but marvelous thing that every truly gifted lyric poet invents a language of her own. Everything is magical here, and everything is real. Lauren-Abunassar knows how to speak in tongues, to say what isn’t quite possible to say otherwise.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
“In poems that crest and turn with fresh metaphors and a deeply observant and curious point of view, Lauren-Abunassar takes the reader on a journey that, as it unfolds, reminds us that ‘even / in the dark, we grow.’”
—Ashley M. Jones, author of Reparations Now! Poems
Every year the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Etel Adnan Poetry Series and awards the $1,000 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize to a first or second book of poetry, in English, by a writer of Arab heritage. Since its inception in 2015 the series has sought to celebrate and foster the writings and writers that make up the vibrant and diverse Arab American community, and the University of Arkansas Press has long been committed to publishing diverse kinds of poetry by a diversity of poets. The series editors are Hayan Charara and Fady Joudah, and the prize is named in honor of the world-renowned poet, novelist, essayist, and artist Etel Adnan.
