This book presents 113 poems, which reflect attitudes of the bedouin, a desert-dwelling, non-literate tribe, to a variety of personal, social and political experiences. Each poem is translated into English with an introduction describing its setting and with notes that clarify the cultural, linguistic and historical background. The poems are also presented in Arabic script […]
We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon contains poems written in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon together with new ones rising from the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon. Following a great tradition of poetry throughout history, this book shows the vast conscience and lyrical spirit of resistance on the part of […]
Despite years of war and tsunamis of sound bites, this will be the first opportunity many readers will have to meet Iraqis as real human beings, speaking heart to heart. In these pages are the unheard voices of Iraq: men and women, Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds. These poems were collected, as the war raged all […]
Knife Sharpener is a posthumous commemoration and celebration of Sargon Boulus in this collection of poems, written between 1991 and 2007 that he translated himself, together with an essay, “Poetry and Memory”, written a few months before he died. With a Foreword by Adonis and an Introduction by Dublin poet and publisher Pat Boran, the […]
Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic is the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his poems Joudah explores big themes—identity, war, religion, what we hold in common—while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her Foreword as “that strange animal, […]
Translated by notable American poet Marilyn Hacker, Lebanese-French poet and novelist Venus Khoury-Ghata explores the formal and mythic attractions, congruencies and incompatibilities of the French and Arabic imaginations and poetic traditions in poems that open like a suitcase filled with alphabets. Sex, barrenness, exile, grief, and death – the backdrop of a war-ravaged country – […]
Baghdad, Mon Amour is a memoir by Salah Al Hamdani centered on his imprisonment under Saddam Hussein, his subsequent exile in France for more than thirty years, and his emotional return to Baghdad and seeing his family again after all those years with feelings of tremendous joy but also guilt for having “abandoned” them. The […]