Nathalie Handal’s Volo goes on a voyage to the heart of death and asks ruminative questions born from war and injustice: “Who dies? Who gets to survive?”; “When we walked away / did the sun’s rays on the bench / bend the beauty of the world?”; “How else can / we liberate / what’s been burning / for centuries?”; “What do we find / at the edge of the last gaze / of the heart?” Traveling over continents, from the Mediterranean to New York, over nearly a century of time, traversing the body of freedom and erotic resistances, she returns to poems for resurrection through her litterae to H.D. and Allen Ginsberg: “Death’s stubborn—it never rests. Maybe that’s how it stops suffering,” or “Maybe we will fall into the sea, forgetting that love is a longer voyage than life.” These poems are an act of radical empathy and connection.

"In these two long poems, Nathalie Handal enters into conversations with the dead, and those conversations become tribute, argument, love song, celebration. Isn't that what poetry is for? To make the dead speak, to stop time, to remind us where we came from? These are lavish, ambitious and deeply felt poems that traffic in mystery and wonder."
— Mark Wunderlich

"Nathalie Handal's exquisite poems always teeter on the thin divide between presence and absence. They absorb the grief of distances and somehow, as in ancient incantations, restore us to wider space and time where nothing can be lost or disappeared. She changes the weather."
— Naomi Shihab Nye