For the past few years, Girmay has been studying texts and other materials that, through form, language(s), diction, and gesture, perform and think about place and loss of place (or displacement). Her most recent collection, The Black Maria (2016), draws from documentary modes and seeks to think about various African and diasporic exchanges, histories, and survival strategies. The book includes a long elegiac cycle for Eritrean asylum seekers who lost their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea. This book also catalogues various estrangements (from the land, from home, from family) in an attempt to consider the nuanced legacies (and bodily consequences) of constructions of race and nation. She continues to be interested in the ways that lyric and lyric narrative modes might provide practitioners with the vitally experimental ‘space’ to access and archive these histories in meaningfully new ways. In addition to this work, Girmay has recently completed an extensive interview with writer Emmy Pérez about place, ecologies, the consequences of the border wall, and her latest book, With the River on Our Face (2016), a lengthy excerpt from which was published by Literary Hub in 2017.