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Praise for The Call of Paradise (Winner of the 2022 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, judged by Diane Seuss):
The speaker of Majda Gama’s The Call of Paradise is a “[b]ride of many cities, daughtered by the East & mothered by the West,” with poems placed in Beirut and punk L.A., Bab Makkah, the Al-Ain Oasis, and “in the red, backhoed dirt of Virginia,” the Red Sea and “the summer / Shoreline in America,” visible and invisible, her hair both black and neon pink, occupying the edge but “unable to submerge.” Even the poems’ forms, at times, feature parenthetical weavings, and ghazal-like shifts and dualities. The result of this fluid positionality is nuanced, hushed witness, oud-scented ritual, and deep artfulness. The speaker may not arrive in paradise, but at the termination of this beautiful sequence of poems, she hears its call.
~Diane Seuss, Contest Judge, and author of frank: sonnets
The speaker of Majda Gama’s The Call of Paradise is a “[b]ride of many cities, daughtered by the East & mothered by the West,” with poems placed in Beirut and punk L.A., Bab Makkah, the Al-Ain Oasis, and “in the red, backhoed dirt of Virginia,” the Red Sea and “the summer / Shoreline in America,” visible and invisible, her hair both black and neon pink, occupying the edge but “unable to submerge.” Even the poems’ forms, at times, feature parenthetical weavings, and ghazal-like shifts and dualities. The result of this fluid positionality is nuanced, hushed witness, oud-scented ritual, and deep artfulness. The speaker may not arrive in paradise, but at the termination of this beautiful sequence of poems, she hears its call.
~Diane Seuss, Contest Judge, and author of frank: sonnets
Sample Poem:
Moon Identity
It wasn’t the moon, but my family let me believe
for at least a few minutes as we drove on the Sheikh
Zayed highway that the globe rising before us, ripe
on the horizon, was the sister to our sun
& why not, it was the color of a rinsed photograph,
the type that bears the tarnish of time & the feeling
was there of breath loss, for it loomed so close
over the highway. We were driving somewhere,
along the open road of a young city, past the biggest
fountain, along the cranes laying the foundation
for the tallest building toward something new--
and aren’t objects in motion their own kind of moon?
I don’t care that it was a balloon, a fun fair ride,
stationed above the old Dubai Creek, where the dhows
have since ceased carrying their sacks of spices.
What I mistook for a moon, she was rising over a rising
city, and we were driving somewhere.
Moon Identity
It wasn’t the moon, but my family let me believe
for at least a few minutes as we drove on the Sheikh
Zayed highway that the globe rising before us, ripe
on the horizon, was the sister to our sun
& why not, it was the color of a rinsed photograph,
the type that bears the tarnish of time & the feeling
was there of breath loss, for it loomed so close
over the highway. We were driving somewhere,
along the open road of a young city, past the biggest
fountain, along the cranes laying the foundation
for the tallest building toward something new--
and aren’t objects in motion their own kind of moon?
I don’t care that it was a balloon, a fun fair ride,
stationed above the old Dubai Creek, where the dhows
have since ceased carrying their sacks of spices.
What I mistook for a moon, she was rising over a rising
city, and we were driving somewhere.
