Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse – författare

A bold, multilingual anthology of Yazidi poetic voices.Ten years have passed since 2014 and the seventy-fourth genocide of the Yazidis, a people who have faced ongoing persecution, displacement, and ethnic cleansing from their ancestral lands in the Kurdish regions. In the wake of this genocidal violence, new poetic voices have emerged in university campuses and IDP camps along the borders of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey, as well as from across the Yazidi diaspora. With globalizing forces compounding the erasure of their culture and traditions, the Yazidi poets in this multilingual anthology firmly stand their ground, their art a testament to Yazidi resistance and presence.This anthology joins in the poetic tradition of the Yazidis, which has historically preserved and documented instances of their traditions, dispossessions, and erasures. It is its own act of witnessing to recount the 2014 genocide for future generations.Translated from both Arabic and Kurmanji, the poets in this anthology affirm that they, indeed, will not let Yazidi voices be missed from this world.

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 CHANGES BOOK PRIZE JUDGED BY LOUISE GLÜCK & EILEEN MYLES The poems of Dream State arise from the poet’s experience living and working in Iraq, not as a soldier or journalist, but as a writer, translator, teacher, and preservationist of Kurdish culture. In a stunning act of cogenerative imagination, Levinson-LaBrosse’s poetic voice emerges alongside the voices of others with whom she has collaborated. Together with her poems, these translated memories, testimonies and stories form an interdependent environment bridging time and perception. As a book, Dream State resists categorization. And yet it is fundamentally accessible in its humanity. People come together in understanding, and break apart just as quickly. Fictions shatter and endure, while national imaginations always seem to be at risk. And everywhere the poet turns, she learns that peace is never self-sustaining. True peace is an enduring act of courage, and one that must be lived everyday. As the 2003 Iraq invasion reached its twentieth anniversary (2023) and the Islamic State’s attempted genocide in Shingal reaches its tenth (2024), Dream State attempts to sit with other people’s experiences, rather than extract details to exploit them; amplifies the work around the poet, rather than supplant it; and trusts that listening to individual perspectives will lead to common understanding.