Ululations: Sounding Out Cries of Joy, Sorrow, and Celebration

In this evocative and deeply personal anthology, Audrey Najor Hall invites us into a journey of self-discovery by sharing stunning, important life stories as poems. Ululations: Sounding Out Cries of Joy Sorrow, and Celebration captures an experience highly prevalent in our world: sexual abuse, physical abuse, rape, incest, grief, loss, and the difficult process of recovery. The themes in the poems shift and evolve as the main character, "Amira", a young Chaldean-American woman in a first-generation family (e.g. both parents not born in the US) who progresses in her self-growth from being a victim to a survivor and, ultimately, a thriver. By not coming forward about such experiences, trauma can become re-enacted tragically from family generation to generation.How do we stop this vicious cycle? The author begins by voicing the untold stories of many women through the main character to recreate new stories and new voices. Audrey's poignant yet subtle poems describe the experience of being a Chaldean-American woman struggling to find her identity in both cultures. This narrative book of poems reveals the duality of the pain and beauty of a culture that complicates the process of the recovery and ethnic identity.The author puts words to Amira's silent stories, and then takes readers on a journey to mourn losses, find love, self-acceptance, and a rebirth of her sexuality, a new coming of age. Themes of love, grief and loss, sexuality, acculturation, and assimilation issues weave throughout her poems. Beginning in a dark space with a closed mouth, this poignant journey of transformation allows readers to imagine the triumph of sounding out words stored for years, making cries of joy, sorrow, celebration, and reverence-ululations, that voice untold stories loud and clear.Although the stories chronicle only one woman's journey as a long narrative poem, the author's intent is to empower all women experiencing grief, loss, and traumas to come back to her true voice, rediscover her essence and inner core, and come back to her center soul. Net proceeds of Ululations go to charity. Read more