Title: In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls
Author: Majda Gama
Publisher: Wandering Aengus Press
Copyright: 2025
Number of Pages: 80
Special Honor: winner, Wandering Aengus Book Award in Poetry
Blurbs by: Eman Quotah, Sahar Muradi, Alina Stefanescu
Key Descriptors: Punk, multi-cultural, feminist, fierce, mythic, incantatory
First Sentence: “A Bedouin tent, an Oriental carpet,/ men on the ground desert fashion/ lean against cushions and sip dark tea.”
Last Sentence: “Stars, name the girls who rise to sing new prayers to the morning.”
Comment: Contradictions and dualities roam freely through Majda Gama’s impressive poetry collection In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls. Right away you know in your bones from the title of the book and later in reading her poem with the same title that there’s nothing modern about what happens in that house. Gama’s book chronicles the education of a girl whose mother is American and whose father is Saudi. It’s no wonder that the narrator of these poems kept a pet rat and adopted Punk Rock culture with its safety pins and such songs as “White Punks on Dope.” However, education rules and transforms her listening from taqwacore, a subgenre of Punk music with an Arabic influence, and the Arabic poetry of Mahmoud Darwish to the English language poetry of Diane Seuss and Emily Dickinson. Expect to learn something new from Majda Gama’s poetry.—it’s rich but she’s not giving it away.
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