In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls
Winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Poetry
In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls vividly chronicles girlhood, womanhood, personhood, humanhood, the passage of time, the indelibility of history, and the grief and joy of being in this world and on this earth. It’s a beautifully midlife book, with all the wisdom and none of the clichés. Majda Gama looks back to her 1980s childhood in oil-boom Jidda and Reagan-era Northern Virginia, to her 1990s young adulthood in a now-gone punk-rock Washington, D.C., and other cities, and to the echoes of history in Ba’albek and the Emirati desert. On every page, we witness a life lived and observed in brave detail. This collection is a treasure.
--Eman Quotah, Arab American Book Award-winning author of Bride of the Sea
If you could craft a poetry collection combining a rock n' roll soundtrack to a young girl's coming of age in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and 1980s with the underground punk scenes of Washington D.C. and New York City in the 1980s/90s, it would be this book. Majda Gama lyrically elegizes a life through the specificity of music and place, where each "city is a song," where even a beachy landscape unfolds to "the falsetto of the latest Wham single." Qur'anic verses and classical Arabic literature are weaved seamlessly with Joan Jett and Television lyrics; marbled courtyards give way to black leather jackets and pet rats. Gama anthologizes times and places that are no more and hard to imagine ever were, given that "now there is a sameness / to every dark corner we will gather in." There is at once a sense of loss and of freedom in the state of being "born untethered" and yet not immune to geopolitics, intimate and global. In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls is a fresh and moving debut from a writer who has lived multiple lives and gifts us its poignant and rhythmic sojourn.
--Sahar Muradi, author of OCTOBERS, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
From the "cataracts of Gods" to the tiny bones scattered throughout this book, Majda Gama's poetics exerts pressure at the spaces of resistance, the cartilage between ribs, the held breaths between stanzas, the lacunae of childhood. Mining the poetics of between and barely, the poet traces the spaces between the familial self (coming from Saudi/KSA) and the american self across reflective and self-reflexive surfaces. The anthropological reverberations made me think of Michael Taussig's statement that "the shortest way between two points, between violence and its analysis, is the long way round, tracing the edge sideways like the crab scuttling." Riding the sidereal and the sideways edge into wonder and terror, Gama's In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls undid me completely.
--Alina Stefanescu, My Heresies (Sarabande, 2025) and DoR (Wandering Aengus Press, 2021)
Gama sketches her family’s origins as she drafts her own maps of the self: the influence of Punk, the hold of Bronze Age artifacts on the imagination. In her poetry, stories are alive and must be kept alive; their little boxes must have holes for breathing. Collecting with a humbled apprehension, she gathers story after story in this reliquary, each a sacred artifact.
--David Keplinger, author of Ice (Milkweed Editions, 2023) and The World to Come (Conduit Books, 2021).
Majda Gama’s In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls looks at the world through the revelatory eye of girlhood. The poems traverse country and landscape as Gama writes from where she “was born and [is] not from. That is the Arab condition.” This book is a tactile beauty of stark contrasts. It names the stars then touches the ground with bare feet. I longed to hang out with the girl in these poems, listening to Joan Jett, cigarette between my lips. Pay attention to Majda Gama. Her sensibility fills in the spaces we overlook.
--Jessica Cuello, Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023).
What do you get when you combine a punk-rocker with a diasporic immigrant existing between two-countries, two cultures, two-languages and a poet who hates herself for ‘blinking under the klieg-light/When I could be dancing to White Punks On Dope.’ You get the intelligent, multilayered, and linguistically surprising poetry of Majda Gama’s In The House of Modern Upbringing for Girls. Trust me when I say this collection has a great beat, and yes you can dance to it, but you will also be edified, spellbound, and wrapped in wonder as you cross internal and external borders on a unique and eloquent journey.
--Tina Schumann, author of Boneyard Heresies and Praising the Paradox.
In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls vividly chronicles girlhood, womanhood, personhood, humanhood, the passage of time, the indelibility of history, and the grief and joy of being in this world and on this earth. It’s a beautifully midlife book, with all the wisdom and none of the clichés. Majda Gama looks back to her 1980s childhood in oil-boom Jidda and Reagan-era Northern Virginia, to her 1990s young adulthood in a now-gone punk-rock Washington, D.C., and other cities, and to the echoes of history in Ba’albek and the Emirati desert. On every page, we witness a life lived and observed in brave detail. This collection is a treasure.
--Eman Quotah, Arab American Book Award-winning author of Bride of the Sea
If you could craft a poetry collection combining a rock n' roll soundtrack to a young girl's coming of age in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and 1980s with the underground punk scenes of Washington D.C. and New York City in the 1980s/90s, it would be this book. Majda Gama lyrically elegizes a life through the specificity of music and place, where each "city is a song," where even a beachy landscape unfolds to "the falsetto of the latest Wham single." Qur'anic verses and classical Arabic literature are weaved seamlessly with Joan Jett and Television lyrics; marbled courtyards give way to black leather jackets and pet rats. Gama anthologizes times and places that are no more and hard to imagine ever were, given that "now there is a sameness / to every dark corner we will gather in." There is at once a sense of loss and of freedom in the state of being "born untethered" and yet not immune to geopolitics, intimate and global. In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls is a fresh and moving debut from a writer who has lived multiple lives and gifts us its poignant and rhythmic sojourn.
--Sahar Muradi, author of OCTOBERS, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
From the "cataracts of Gods" to the tiny bones scattered throughout this book, Majda Gama's poetics exerts pressure at the spaces of resistance, the cartilage between ribs, the held breaths between stanzas, the lacunae of childhood. Mining the poetics of between and barely, the poet traces the spaces between the familial self (coming from Saudi/KSA) and the american self across reflective and self-reflexive surfaces. The anthropological reverberations made me think of Michael Taussig's statement that "the shortest way between two points, between violence and its analysis, is the long way round, tracing the edge sideways like the crab scuttling." Riding the sidereal and the sideways edge into wonder and terror, Gama's In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls undid me completely.
--Alina Stefanescu, My Heresies (Sarabande, 2025) and DoR (Wandering Aengus Press, 2021)
Gama sketches her family’s origins as she drafts her own maps of the self: the influence of Punk, the hold of Bronze Age artifacts on the imagination. In her poetry, stories are alive and must be kept alive; their little boxes must have holes for breathing. Collecting with a humbled apprehension, she gathers story after story in this reliquary, each a sacred artifact.
--David Keplinger, author of Ice (Milkweed Editions, 2023) and The World to Come (Conduit Books, 2021).
Majda Gama’s In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls looks at the world through the revelatory eye of girlhood. The poems traverse country and landscape as Gama writes from where she “was born and [is] not from. That is the Arab condition.” This book is a tactile beauty of stark contrasts. It names the stars then touches the ground with bare feet. I longed to hang out with the girl in these poems, listening to Joan Jett, cigarette between my lips. Pay attention to Majda Gama. Her sensibility fills in the spaces we overlook.
--Jessica Cuello, Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023).
What do you get when you combine a punk-rocker with a diasporic immigrant existing between two-countries, two cultures, two-languages and a poet who hates herself for ‘blinking under the klieg-light/When I could be dancing to White Punks On Dope.’ You get the intelligent, multilayered, and linguistically surprising poetry of Majda Gama’s In The House of Modern Upbringing for Girls. Trust me when I say this collection has a great beat, and yes you can dance to it, but you will also be edified, spellbound, and wrapped in wonder as you cross internal and external borders on a unique and eloquent journey.
--Tina Schumann, author of Boneyard Heresies and Praising the Paradox.
Photo credit: Sara T. Gama
Majda Gama was born in Beirut to a Saudi father and an American mother. Raised in Jeddah and the United States, she lived/studied in Egypt and England as well. She is the author of the chapbook The Call of Paradise selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2022 Two Sylvias chapbook prize. Her full-length poetry manuscript, In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls, won the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Poetry. Poems have recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, Four Way Review, The Offing, Ploughshares, POETRY, We Call to the Eye & the Night (Persea) an anthology of love poems by Arab Anglophone poets, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and Terrain.org. Majda is Shenandoah journal’s 2023 Graybeal-Gowen award winner for Virginia poets. She is based in Northern Virginia where she tends to a native plant garden that was certified as a home wildlife sanctuary by the Audubon Society. Majda is currently a co-host of the long running DC literary salon Café Muse, a role she took on in 2020 after stepping down from her position as poetry editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She loves cardamon in her tea, saffron in her chocolate, and rosewater in everything.
https://www.majdagama.com/
https://www.majdagama.com/