If My House Has a Voice
If My House Has a Voice (Newfound, 2023) serves as a guide through the immigrant narrative. A blurring of foreign and familiar, a tapestry of cultures and form, this debut chapbook attempts to decode the elusive: language, borders, and (un)belonging. The poems in If My House Has a Voice move across Syria, Russia, and America, inviting us to look beyond ourselves, into the ground and the people that shape us.
Praise:
“With If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin offers up a vivid, complex, multilingual self-portrait that is also a delightful, sharply rendered tribute to the myriad places and people to whom she belongs. These are poems that move, formally and emotionally: couplets leap across caesuras, ‘lax vowels [skew the] jaw,’ and histories meet in ways that catalyze a vibrant, surprising, embodied new music. Katrin’s verse makes every sense come alive.”
— Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
Publications
So to Speak, “Dear Mary,” (2024)
Electric Lit, “Femininity as Wish-Fulfillment,” “Sara” (2024)
Poetry Daily, “The Crossing of Our Accents” (2024)
Verse Daily, “We Meet Again, U.S. Customs and Border Protection” (2024)
Koukash Review, “The Crossing of Our Accents” (2023)
Nimrod International Journal, “Base of Fire,” “November as Still Life” (Fall/Winter 2023 Print Issue)
bath magg, “Madlen” + audio (2023)
Hooligan Mag, “Let’s Get Back to the Party” (2023)
The Fourth River, “I—,” “Pickled Tradition,” and “Ode to Mycorrhizal Networks” (Spring 2023 Print Issue)
BreakBread Magazine, “On the Other End of Translation” (2022)
New World Writing Quarterly, “Spring Grace” (2022)
The American Journal of Poetry, “We Meet Again, U.S. Customs and Border Protection” (2022)
Oyster River Pages, “Portraits of America” + audio (2021)
Voices & Visions, “Self-Portrait as Chronic Illness,” “Piecing Her Body” (2021)
Rappahannock Review, “Hip Replacement at Twenty-One” + audio (2021)
Gravel, “From the Perspective of the Russian Language,” “American Sonnet for Russia,” “Even Better” (Spring 2021 Print Issue)
The Emerson Review, “Language Roundelay” (pp. 86-87) (2021)
Prometheus Dreaming, “The Closest Thing” (2020)
Bio: Elina Katrin is a Syrian-Russian immigrant and the author of the poetry chapbook If My House Has a Voice (Newfound, 2023). Her writing was selected as a semi-finalist for The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and has appeared in Electric Lit, Poetry Daily, So to Speak, and elsewhere. A participant of the Kenyon Review and Tin House Writing Workshops, she works and organizes with Mizna as a Community Engagement Coordinator and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She currently lives in Los Angeles, CA with a dream and her cardigan.