The Paper Camera by Youmna Chlala
Litmus Press
2019
Softcover / 229 x 184 mm / 84 pp
ISBN 978-1-933959-35-1
$18
“Beauty is back, rejoice!” So ends The Paper Camera, Youmna Chlala’s flickering catalog of Beirut and other cities, where loss and longing are interspersed with vignettes of intimacy: family members make salad and go swimming; lovers observe each other with a languorous curiosity; childhood objects resurface. Charting the absence between unrecoverable points of origin and migrating bodies, The Paper Camera is a multilingual, hybrid text that explores how the boundaries of a city map themselves onto language and memory, while poetry proposes a new cartography. “First, we had to learn each other’s languages. / This was the longest, most loving trial. / Then we undid our own.”