If My House Has a Voice serves as a guide through the immigrant narrative. A blurring of foreign and familiar, a tapestry of cultures and form, this debut chapbook attempts to decode the elusive: language, borders, and (un)belonging. The poems in If My House Has a Voice move across Syria, Russia, and America, inviting us to look beyond ourselves, into the ground and the people that shape us.
Praise
“With If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin offers up a vivid, complex, multilingual self-portrait that is also a delightful, sharply rendered tribute to the myriad places and people to whom she belongs. These are poems that move, formally and emotionally: couplets leap across caesuras, ‘lax vowels [skew the] jaw,’ and histories meet in ways that catalyze a vibrant, surprising, embodied new music. Katrin’s verse makes every sense come alive.” —Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat” DRIVE