“In this dreamlike and haunted debut, Danielle Badra fulfills what Allen Grossman considers poetry’s highest calling—to resist the disappearance of the beloved. Badra remembers and dialogues with her deceased sister Rachal and her own poetic lines in this testament to the persistence of spirit—a kind of resurrection poetics in which loss and life, onion and honey, sister and self commingle on the tongue. ‘The world opens up to you / between gypsum and jasmine. [. . .] Your body is a fugitive of always.’”
—Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps and Sand Opera

“Perhaps all true elegies are written as though the dead were somehow just out of earshot and alive to answer. Certainly, Danielle Badra insists on still listening to her sister. By incorporating her sister’s poems into her own, Badra embodies a loss that lives on as half her voice. Across the gap between the living and the dead these powerful poems pass, fragmentary intimacies that through quotation and repetition accrue into shared ritual and healing song. Out of family, memory, and poetry a new, collaborative self emerges, and new love flares full of its true luminosity and danger. ‘Incandescent, / a star is both light and bomb.’”
—Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days