Helal disorients space in a way that is both welcome and necessary ... The absurdity of the U.S. immigration system becomes especially clear when she describes, in detail, her path to citizenship ... The markings brought to the pages throughout this collection are framed such that readers must look and think about how they, too, are complicit, to varying degrees, with the racism and tyranny of U.S. CIS, ICE, and the TSA ... I would rather live in a world in which Cairo can emerge on the other side of a tunnel in California. In Helal’s imaginative future, movement is no less complex, but it is far more free.
Helal’s debut full-length collection, Invasive Species, is a liberation from the governance of capital-E English and an embrace of the gorgeous mutations that can be made of its more malleable cousin, lowercase-e english. It's written in many englishes ... Helal harnesses the English (capital E) of governments and visas and borders, wielding it radically and expertly.
Helal’s first and often stellar book belongs to many categories, and to none ... The volume shows her powers — and her amply justified anger ... Helal’s essay on her departure and her return takes up most of her book ... That essay’s sad, or shocking, moments build to a muted, perhaps optimistic conclusion ... Other, shorter segments of the volume show just as much fire, and more variety. The more-than-clever opening piece introduces a form that Helal dubs 'the Arabic,' whose lines must be read (like Arabic) right to left as well as left to right ... Helal’s title puns on the ecological concept of invasive species (like Asian carp in United States lakes) and on the notion that immigrants cannot belong here. The poet may be safe in Brooklyn now, but how many others — how many other Arabic speakers, how many Arab-Americans, how many African-Americans — are not? ... Such questions generate Helal’s best work ... It is a push that could, and should, open doors.
...ambitious, groundbreaking ... Helal’s incisive lyrics cut to the core of persistent issues and explode boundaries between genres ... Footnotes and citations complicate the relationship between author, text, and audience, as the book defiantly refuses to categorize itself ... Helal has succeeded in generating poetry that is uniquely African, Arabic, and American. Highly recommended.
Marwa Helal’s Invasive species would be worth reading if all it did was give readers a deep look at the United State’s complicated and deeply racist immigration system, which it does quite well ... The thing about invasive species is that they often thrive in their new environments, outcompeting the species already existing in that niche and creating a new ecosystem, no matter what humans try to do to stop them. And that’s the tone Helal strikes ... There’s amazing humor, killer craft and wordplay.
Helal unflinchingly captures the limitations of language and policy while presenting rich poetic possibilities through many modes of existing ... throughout the collection, the consequences of language are not taken lightly ... This elliptical, non-linear structure brilliantly echoes the physical and political migrations and returns recalled and imagined in the poems ... Helal’s strategies include documentation but also insist on imagination and creation.
... timely and surprising ... striking ... Helal’s use of prose is an effective choice, supporting a narrative that unfolds as part autobiography and part ethnography of the 'immigration industrial complex.' The result is a stylized documentation (simultaneously an abecedarian and an alphabetized catalogue of events) of a sociopolitical situation steeped in paperwork with dehumanizing terminology and discriminatory requirements designed to create obstacles and not, despite the claims of these institutions, to expedite access or citizenship ... inventively protests the ways American culture, proclaiming the foreign and alien undesirable, demands that its immigrant communities assimilate ... also reimagines the conventions we have come to expect from poetry. It’s as if Helal proposes that, in this instance too, we should re-examine the confines of definition and the rules that restrict belonging.
The patchwork of texts is this collection’s strangest and most impressive attribute ... Helal repurposes English for her own intentions, with poems that read right to left, forms that are blocky and heavy, poems that refuse to bend or budge, poems that force the reader’s eyes to adjust. These poems have weight as well as momentum ... impressively, prosaically present ... What is so exciting about this book is the way that Helal makes her own rules – about language, about poetry – and defends them in the face of potential naysayers...In this practice she becomes part of a long tradition of black and brown writers who repurpose the colonizer’s language for their art/survival ... When the distance is finally closed and vulnerability is raw on the page, there emerge clear moments of tenderness ... a book that brings the reader close, so close, that they cannot help but see. By the end it’s unclear whether Helal has invaded our thoughts or if we have invaded hers, but it’s obvious that we’re better off for it.
Helal 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.
Helal worked as a journalist and trained as a nonfiction writer, and these poems, like Claudia Rankine’s, (who is clearly an influence) make me question the difference between poetry and reportage. This is a real project book, rather than the collections of shiny one-offs I’m used to seeing in first books, and it doesn’t have a ton of perfect little lyrics of the type I’d like to quote to hook you—it builds as it goes, and its perspective and emotion feels earned. In the end, it’s this poet’s faith in form that drives me through the book ... This is an overtly political book, offering readers a highly interior view of the way immigration policies shape an individual life.
...deeply felt ... Helal reverses expectations (and syntax) and deflects the unidirectional flow of state authority with a biting sense of humor ... Helal finds in poetry something that goes beyond resistance or balm, and might even approach hope.
