Zmagria: Poems
by Mouna Ammar
| Poetry
| Published 11-03-2024
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 clichè, 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.
Mouna Ammar is a mother, writer, independent scholar, researcher, educational linguist, postpartum doula, and wayward chef/baking dabbler living in Ann Arbor by way of Los Angeles and Algiers. She has been writing since her early teens. Her favorite themes are love of the earth, strength, survival, spirit, and sustaining traditions. She derives her poetic inspirations from her North African culture and heritage as well as her Los Angeles upbringing. Her poetic guidance come from multicultural sources as eclectic as Alkhansaa and Langston Hughes, Allama Iqbal and Safia ElHillo, Al Mutanabbi and Aja Monet, Mahmoud Darwish and Sonia Sanchez, Pablo Neruda and Gwendolyn Brooks, Joy Harjo and Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath and Suheir Hammad, Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams, Agha Shahid Ali and Hala Alyan, Gloria Anzaldúa and Amiri Baraka, Warsan Shire and Naomi Shihab Nye. This is Mouna's debut collection of poems and is only one beginning. Find her on Instagram at @FROMMOUNA_AMMAR