Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Women's Studies. In TUNSIYA/AMRIKIYA, emerging Tunisian-American poet Leila Chatti explores the nuances of multicultural identity, the necessity of family, and the perennial search for belonging. From vantage points on both sides of the Atlantic, Chatti investigates the perpetual exile that comes from always being separated from some essential part of oneself.
“To write a series of poems out of extreme illness is a bracing accomplishment indeed. In Deluge... Leila Chatti, born of a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, brilliantly explores the trauma." —Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as flooding. In the Qur’an, as in the Bible, the Flood was sent as punishment. The idea of disease as punishment drives this collection’s themes of shame, illness, grief, and gender, transmuting religious narratives through the lens of a young Arab-American woman suffering a taboo female affliction. Deluge investigates the childhood roots of faith and desire alongside their present day enactments. Chatti’s remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden. This powerful piece of life-writing depicts Chatti’s journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both. Chatti blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and medical terminology in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.
How to live with difference—not necessarily in peace, but with resilience, engagement, and a lack of vitriol—is a defining worry in America at this moment. The poets, fiction writers, and essayists (plus one graphic novelist) who contributed to Welcome to the Neighborhood don’t necessarily offer roadmaps to harmonious neighboring. Some of their narrators don’t even want to be neighbors. Maybe they grieve, or rage. Maybe they briefly find resolution or community. But they do approach the question of what it means to be neighbors, and how we should do it, with open minds and nuance. The many diverse contributors give this collection a depth beyond easy answers. Their attentions to the theme of neighborliness as an ongoing evolution offer hope to readers: possible pathways for rediscovering community, even just by way of a shared wish for it. The result is an enormously rich resource for the classroom and for anyone interested in reflecting on what it means to be American today, and how place and community play a part. Contributors include Leila Chatti, Rita Dove, Jonathan Escoffery, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Amina Gautier, Ross Gay, Mark Halliday, Joy Harjo, Edward Hirsch, Marie Howe, Sonya Larson, Dinty W. Moore, Robert Pinsky, Christine Schutt, and many more.
Poems to Turn to Again and Again – from Amanda Gorman, Sharon Olds, Kate Baer, and More Created and compiled just for young women, You Don’t Have to Be Everything is filled with works by a wide range of poets who are honest, unafraid, and skilled at addressing the complex feelings of coming-of-age, from loneliness to joy, longing to solace, attitude to humor. These unintimidating poems offer girls a message of self-acceptance and strength, giving them permission to let go of shame and perfectionism. The cast of 68 poets is extraordinary: Amanda Gorman, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, who read at Joe Biden's inauguration; bestselling authors like Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Acevedo, Sharon Olds, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Mary Oliver; Instagram-famous poets including Kate Baer, Melody Lee, and Andrea Gibson; poets who are LGBTQ, poets of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds, poets who sing of human experience in ways that are free from conventional ideas of femininity. Illustrated in full color with work by three diverse artists, this book is an inspired gift for daughters and granddaughters—and anyone on the path to becoming themselves. No matter how old you are, it helps to be young when you're coming to life, to be unfinished, a mysterious statement, a journey from star to star. —Joy Ladin, excerpt from "Survival Guide"
The Thicket opens into intimate encounters with the more-than-human world—rivers, birds, stones—and with a “you” that is not a person, necessarily, but also not not a person: maybe God, maybe an aspect of the self, maybe neither or both. Often speaking of/to the small or overlooked (weeds by a roadside, an abandoned silo), the poems orient themselves toward edges, transitional spaces like the one where fields shift into woods. Where does one body stop? The Thicket takes an interest in becoming, one thing flowing into something else. Excerpt from “At Cape Henlopen” All night wind insists in the trees, its unsteady hush funneling us down into sleep under the tender shelter the oaks, even leafless, make—all night their trunks creak and sigh and speak. Speak to me—I think the word protect until its edges dissolve, inside the tent that wraps us like another, thinner skin, rocked and chastened by the wind that doesn’t cease . . .
Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. "ORDERING THE STORM empowers readers to see the poetry collection as an artistic medium in itself, and offers diverse perspectives on the subject. Experienced writers and beginners alike will find inspiration and encouragement in the words of exceptional poets such as Maggie Anderson, Wanda Coleman, and Beckian Fritz Goldberg. This book should be required reading for all graduate student poets, even those who are still in the process of writing their first collection, because it includes essential information on poetic sequencing and useful strategies for examining a manuscript's possibilities. One of the most exciting aspects of the book is the sense of community that readers feel upon exploring each essay. ORDERING THE STORM transforms the task of arranging poems from a solitary undertaking to a collaborative adventure"--Mary Biddinger, Associate Editor of RHINO.
We live in an Islamophobic world, where Muslim people are constantly under attack, and must prove their innocence when they’ve not even committed a crime. We also live in a world of rigid gender roles and gender violence, where women, gender non-conforming and trans people are victims of violence, and have their gender expressions, freedoms, and desires policed. There’s pressure from both Muslims and non-Muslims to fit into severe stereotypes of Muslim identity and the ways in which it is acceptable to be Muslim. The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me is a celebration of intersectional identity that dispels the notion that there is one correct way to be a Muslim, particularly for women, gender non-conforming, and trans people. In holding space for multiple intersecting identities, the anthology celebrates and protects those identities.
While for many years scholars and journalists have focused on the more obvious manifestations of political life in the Middle East, one major theme has been consistently neglected. This is Pan-Syrian nationalism--the dream of creating a Greater Syria out of an area now governed by Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Turkey. Though not nearly as well known as Arab or Palestinian nationalism and hardly studied in depth, Pan-Syrianism has had a profound effect on Middle Eastern politics since the end of World War I. In Greater Syria, the noted Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes provides the first comprehensive account of this intriguing, important, and little understood ideology.
Mary Peelen's spare poems pulse with what they contain and describe--in both the imagistic and the mathematical sense of the word--harnessing the power of the sciences to navigate the chthonic worlds of illness, loss, and desire on both personal and planetary scales. Peelen denies the divisions of mind and body, art and science, precision and ardor. Her poems resonate with allusion (Lady Lazarus's hair as a supernova) and sound (copernicium, ununoctium). Peelen unveils new ways to make sense of our complicated, contradictory world. -- Elizabeth Bradfeld, naturalist and author of Once Removed
