“Sara Elkamel’s luminous Garden City explores the delicate boundary between oneself and the other, revealing a profound truth: life turns us all into strangers—even to ourselves. This collection is not merely sharp; it brims with genuine heart.” —Nicole Sealey

“Sara Elkamel is lucky on almost every page of this beautiful chapbook…I say ‘lucky’ but mean talented. And what is this talent? It is an ability to go back into the past, capture what happened, and come back to us, into our temporary, unsure present, with a myth that clarifies, a dream (or nightmare) captured in language that sets that past to music… Sara Elkamel is a terrific poet.” —Ilya Kaminsky

“Garden City is a lapidary, fecund investigation of the lives of women: mothers and kittens, sisters and angels—as well as female prisoners of the state, who coexist in a temporally synesthetic lockdown between pharaonic and contemporary Egypt. Recalling the splintered density of Momtaza Mehri and the stark abstraction of Alejandra Pizarnik, Elkamel’s diaries of desire and Cairene psychogeography first seem urbane and quietly playful––then [she disrupts them] with bursts of violence, not unlike Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting of Judith beheading Holofernes.” —Ken Chen