<p>Linguistically fluid and geographically expansive, Nathalie Handal&#39;s <em>Life in a Country Album</em> is a haunting hymn of shapeshifting. Intimate and political at once, it is composed from a palette that comprises brief revelations, such as <em>Tendresse: A Testament</em> as well as expansive meditations like <em>American Camino</em>, in which she asks, &ldquo;<em>So what if some hyphenate, and others don&rsquo;t</em>?&rdquo;</p><p>This question of belonging lies at the heart of <em>Life in a Country Album</em>: who gets to decide who belongs? Can you be exiled from your own sense of self, or as Nathalie puts it in <em>Europa Nostra</em>, &ldquo;<em>Now that we are guests in our bodies, how do we survive?</em>&rdquo; One of the remarkable things about this collection is how our current global geopolitics can alter how it is read: an ill-reasoned airstrike and the sense of a safe home becomes precarious.</p><p>If <em>a bed is a city of teeming dreams </em>then this collection is a world of human possibilities. In its clarity, craft and chimeric language, it is a love letter and admonition mailed by the same stamp. In this, her seventh collection, Nathalie reaffirms that she remains an urgent and singular voice in contemporary poetry.</p>