“Danielle Badra’s Like We Still Speak is both pristine and audacious—pristine in its acute responsiveness to the subjects at hand—profound loss, staggering grief, and overarching love—and audacious in its courage to ‘still speak’ in contrapuntal braiding with the voices of the dead. These poems reveal a dynamic collaboration with the living and the dead, in English, in Arabic, with other writers, visual artists, parents, friends, and most potently, the poet’s sister Rachal, who compels Badra’s exquisite formal innovations. Her grand achievement: to have built poems on the foundation of sustained love, both cultural and intimate, and to have centered her poetics in dialogues that enact an inclusiveness, an elegant defiance, beyond anything I have read.
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
“In this dreamlike and haunted debut, Danielle Badra fulfills what Allen Grossman considers poetry’s highest calling—to resist the disappearance of the beloved. Badra remembers and dialogues with her deceased sister Rachal and her own poetic lines in this testament to the persistence of spirit—a kind of resurrection poetics in which loss and life, onion and honey, sister and self commingle on the tongue. ‘The world opens up to you / between gypsum and jasmine. [. . .] Your body is a fugitive of always.’”
—Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps and Sand Opera
“In these beautiful, carefully crafted poems of love and loss, Danielle Badra mourns and speaks with the dead. There’s a sense of being halved, reflected visually on the page in her diptychs, which interweave her late sister’s words with hers. There’s also, simultaneously, a sense of connection in that very act of intertwining words. A collection about life and death, not as dichotomy, but as painful conversation, in which grief is as inevitable as small delights.”
—Zeina Hashem Beck, author of Louder than Hearts