RaveThe Adroit JournalHelal delivers a nearly unoccupied field that is itself semantically occupied with the obscurity of those who would be pre-occupied with occupied territories. Who goes there? And what am I doing here? ... The book rounds out with a poem that employs a homeoteleuton of rapper Juvenile’s punctuating \'ha,\' as well as an ode to DJ Khaled that helps to underline music and lyric as sites for vernacular connection while foreclosing any kneejerk tendency toward hierarchies of register, art, inspiration, or responsibility to genre ... Candid and confident about its ecosystems of influence, at times wildly omnivorous and polylingual, purposefully pedestrian at others, the lyrical avatar of Invasive species is one whose existential impulse seems to be rabid availability—to the poet’s multitude of peoples and places—negotiated crossways by a slick, uppercutting investment in infiltration rather than naturalization, divergence (not \'diversity\'), and didacticism as a form of information smuggling ... Helal’s is a work that could be described as attempting to alchemize M. NourbeSe Philip’s and June Jordan’s expressly stated needs ... swiftly takes its place among those volumes that have been donned with the epithet of \'linguistically playful; but would more aptly be called linguistically displaced and reparative, formally discontented, prescriptively disinterested, and necessarily chimaeric. A scrubbing restlessness—and the question of what space of respite exists for it—infuses Helal’s utterance and demand for utterance.
