Naguib has a voice that feels fully formed from the first page. Her movement across countries and cultures is the gravitational field of this collection, which takes the story of her becoming—many of the poems approach coming of age from different angles; "Bildungsroman," "Prologue to Womanhood," "Rumours of an Origin"—and places it within the geopolitical world she grew up in.

Poem after poem, Naguib confronts migrant abuse in the Arabian Gulf, the prickly afterlives of America's War on Terror, the violence and erasure at the center of it all. But even while moving through these larger histories, her poetry never loses sight of the people closest to her. Her father, mother, and sister move in and out of the book, rendered with an attention that approaches devotion.

The collection is at its most alive in the first two sections, which examine the speaker's awakening to bodily pleasure within a strict religious environment alongside her refusal to look away from violence. The later sections are less concentrated, though they push the book's formal range somewhere new.

I think this collection will resonate especially with readers of Leila Chatti and Aria Aber, and with anyone drawn to metaphors that work like water on stone.

Thank you for the advanced reader's copy.

This is a solid body of work. The collection was well put together and cohesive. I wouldn’t go back to this collection, but I did enjoy it.

Poems of belonging and loss. I've been very into poems of place of late—more generally, I like collections with strong themes, and this delivers. The book spans countries, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan to the United States; there's a sense that what "home" means shifts in each place. At times I could nearly smell the difference in the air, the hot dry heat of Saudi Arabia's desert competing against street food stalls in Lahore.

The language is clear enough to follow and slippery enough to keep one thinking, which is just how I like poetry; this is all personal preference, of course, but I don't have a poet's brain and thus am happiest with things that have enough of the literal that I have a hope of understanding but that still make me work for it (poetry being one of those things that is most satisfying when you feel like you've earned it).

I couldn't take many notes on this one, because I had to read it on my phone, so I'll keep this short—but recommended to those looking for poetry about identity, place, home, navigating spaces not built for you.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Rapture anthem by Hera naguib might not have been written to teach, but I learned a lot from it. This memoir-like collection is devastating and yet Naguib seems strong willed and determined throughout. Definitely a good read.

Surprizing and endless, the poems in Rupture Anthem deliver moments of self-reflection— /as in a miracle, like the epoch crumbling in her hair/ as well as depictions of atrocities in the speaker’s particular surrounds, through the voice of a Muslim girl. In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where her father worked under the Kafala System, one day from nowhere, police arrive at her house ; her father ordered to return to Lahore, Pakistan. Her teenaged life blown into shivering pieces. With her devastated father, mother and siblings, our heroine must parse a way to come-of-age whole in the unknown culture that is supposed to be her native homeland. And further, when she moves to America, she comes face to face with the global, militarized fallout of a post 9/11 landscape, where the promise of freedom is often a liminal space.

What truly would I give to belong ?/ To breathe inconspicuous as a dab/ on a box Mother clamps over the still humid/ dinner across the globe/
*
It’s true I bury all the cities I call/ home & wear them like the sky’s/ feigned amnesia, I throb/tedious, as the landscape outside/ where each evening the same rangy cat/licks the fungal pool in the balding grass/

Reading this collection has filled in my understanding of the history of women’s voices in authoritarian governments. The woman wearing a niqab is not absent voice. No. In the context of femicide, secrets held in are razor clear, hot, propulsive, dangerous and hopeful. Naguib masterfully balances documentary poetry with an acute and sensual lyricism, demonstrating that the speaker is not a passive victim of global systems. Instead, she claims her autonomy using bodily pleasure and sensory indulgence to push back against strict societal mores. Through irrepressible lyric riffs, questions to the speaker’s interior, and to the reader, using English informed and completed by Arabic phrases and words, metaphorical vehicles : moon as a claw, mouth as rancid fruit, and urgently placed sounds— chuk a chuka/chuk warmth of needles/that drive the line, we read a girl-to-woman’s auto-biography that speaks for Muslim women, and all women whose brilliant voices have been held in locked vaults.