CHLALA, Youmna
The Paper Camera

“Beauty is back, rejoice!” So ends The Paper Camera, Youmna Chlala’s flickering catalog of Beirut and other cities, where loss and longing are interspersed with vignettes of intimacy: family members make salad and go swimming; lovers observe each other with a languorous curiosity; childhood objects resurface. Charting the absence between unrecoverable points of origin and migrating bodies, The Paper Camera is a multilingual, hybrid text that explores how the boundaries of a city map themselves onto language and memory, while poetry proposes a new cartography. “First, we had to learn each other’s languages. / This was the longest, most loving trial. / Then we undid our own.” [publisher’s note]

Published by Litmus Press, 2019
Design by Mark Addison Smith
Artists' Books / Poetry