PRAISE

"presently i am alive is lush. Dalia Barghouty is on a road-trip somewhere inside a computer, a map, and her succulent on the dash board of her text. ’To be sexy is to be immediate & it’s sexy to say yes,’ she writes, her finger pressed on the economies of desire, womanhood, and capitalistic ideals of pleasure. She sorts through the admiration of body, of lust, of want, kicking stones all the while as she reflects, ‘my dad immigrated to the u.s. for this —.' Barghouty’s world is expansive, from the Midwest to the West, with Gemini moons and a funny, doe-eyed gaze stretching into Palestine. presently i am alive is hungry: for Palestine, screaming inside capitalism’s mazes and peaches as she roams through the American grid. Her collection is a rush of Lacanian paradigms, the American road-trip, and computerised worlds. Barghouty masterfully twists us along her grapevines, showing us the Dionysian summoning simmering in the mundane." - leena aboutaleb, author of Expeditions of Projection

"Straddling several mediational limbs as it sings, screams, moans, and laments, Dalia Barghouty's presently i am alive is a reflexive, glossy inscription spawned from the virtual loins of a Lacanian case history and an American road trip." - Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal

"Dalia Barghouty’s presently i am alive is a modern meditation on girlhood in the digital age, one that will make you laugh out loud and clutch your heart. At times, the collection feels like an indie comedy written by Diablo Cody, with clever innuendo (“This peach — a desert i mean — dessert !!!”) and odes to hypersexuality (“I want to ride you far and fast midwest to west”). Barghouty isn’t afraid to embrace the most feral parts of the femme experience, with a poem about self-pleasure and cyber sex sprinkled with heart and bow emojis and another about questioning the meaning of life in a one-sided conversation with a succulent. “To be sexy is to be immediate & it’s sexy to say yes,” she writes, going on to describe what American media tells women to want and be. presently i am alive feels less like picking the lock and reading a secret diary and more like reading through an unapologetically public LiveJournal—Barghouty doesn’t care who sees." - Lauren Milici, author of Sad Sexy Catholic

AUTHOR

Dalia Barghouty was born in the Midwest in 1995 when the commercial internet was also born.  She writes about, theorizes, hates, and loves American Media in Northern California.