by Mouna Ammar (Author)
Zmagria, Mouna's debut collection of poems celebrates a familiar and fresh mosaic of a woman paying homage to her roots and contemporary realities as she imagines in print. Mouna invites you to contemplate the tiles she carries in a box owned by a daughter of North African immigrants who found themselves in Los Angeles, a town very reminiscent of their "home"... a town where the swaying mezcla of languages, landscapes, flavors, and cultural traditions all draw immigrants to understand, in their deepest, and beyond the reach of clich?, that they are of the other and the other is in themselves. These poems offer a gallery walk through Mouna's sojourns, their timbre at times soft, and stark at others. Mouna's writing borrows imagery and aesthetics of North Africa and Southern California both - a Mediterranean-connected aesthetic that is perfectly at ease playing in the spaces of hybridity, even, and maybe especially, when that play involves movement.