Mirene Arsanios

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Notes on Mother Tongues

Colonialism, class, and giving what you don’t have

Praise for Notes on Mother Tongues

Mirène Arsanios’s Notes on Mother Tongues is a decolonizing critical-poetic essay we need to read now. Thinking with brevity and brio through the idea of the ‘mother tongue,’ Arsanios sings knowledge into life out of languagelessness, creatively writing against essentialisms and interrogating the historical dance between class and colonialism. Her praxis here embraces the 'speculative,' the improvisatory, and the ghostly, ultimately bringing us closer to language’s truths.
— John Keene

With all the luxurious love of the poets I take part in the sentences that Mirene Arsanios writes. They begin with words and end in places. This translative act incorporates the Englishes of elsewhere into the pleasure of reading for those of us who are often looking elsewhere to read.
— Christopher Rey Pérez