ReviewWhat does it mean to live with a communal memory so catastrophic that one has a permanent sense of coming AFTER? Babo Kamel, in these beautifully cadenced poems of understated passion, draws on the vivid, fanciful dreamscapes of Chagall against the nightmare of history, intensifying by contrast both the value and the violation of a world forever lost. Powerful, poignant, and timely in today's world of refugees: this true folk tale--"the story of breadcrumbs/how birds ate the way home."Eleanor Wilner Open this small book and enter a world of feeling bright with music and lit with clouds trailing streams of color: Babo Kamel's After is "a whole circus of violins/ tasting of amber and rain." Her poems dance through our understanding, large with history, and leave "red memory / on the skin," calling us and our beloved dead "back again into the half-light of being." Kamel's light illuminates experience that becomes our own, vivid as the paintings that have evoked these passionate and beautiful poems, and gives them their living presence on the page.Deena Linett, author of Translucent When Fired: Poems New & Selected, and What Winter Means, a novel.About the AuthorOriginally from Montreal, Canada, Babo Kamel now resides in Venice, Florida. Her poems have appeared in literary journals in the US, Australia, and Canada. Some of these include Painted Bride Quarterly, Abyss & Apex, The Greensboro Review, Cleaver, The Grolier Poetry Prize, Rabbit, Contemporary Verse 2, Rust +Moth, Mobius, a Journal of Social Change, 2River Review, The San Pedro River Review, Redactions, and The Inflectionist Review. She was a winner of The Charlotte Newberger Poetry Prize and is a three-time Pushcart nominee. You can find her at www.babokamel.com.