Crowded House by Safia Jama

Like a Viewfinder with overlapping reels, Safia Jama examines the way inherited trauma—her parents and brother fleeing military dictatorship in Somalia—can overlay the present day: “when my husband and I parted / ways, it seemed natural to me to pack, as if, for a day trip, / telling no one save two friends.” As a new life comes into focus, the speaker of the poems turns her attention to the tiny theater of “my small room” – “gazing out the window: I call it windowing” and marveling at bathroom mold that looks like Charles Bronson. The poems in Crowded House captivatingly delve into the complexities of the self and what constitutes a home.

—Matthea Harvey

The compassionately clear-eyed lyrics in Crowded House lead us in and out of terror, gratitude, premonition, humor, and real and imagined connections between private pain and the pain of others. "It's strange how things that happened before we were born / get braided into our consciousness," muses one speaker. In trying to understand what we can live by in the various contexts of empire, diaspora, family, a marriage (and its dissolution), or within the rise and fall of one's own wildest ideas, Safia Jama uses the poetic line in "weird combinations of extravagance / and asceticism" to unearth new glimpses of why human beings act—and dream—as they do. 

—Sandra Lim