For Your Thursday Afternoon: (Arab and) Arabic Poetry
Adonis is still working on poetry, but next—his memoirs.
Adonis is still working on poetry, but next—his memoirs.
“First of all, I can’t write poetry in any other language. Impossible. I have to write in Arabic because each language has its own history and Arabic is my history. I consider Arabic to be the most beautiful language.”
On the heels of Banipal 38: Arab American Authors (although he doesn’t mention the collection), the HuffPost’s Anis Shivani asked 10 Arab American writers: “What is distinctive about Arab-American writing today?”
The Pomegranate Alone, released this summer in Arabic, is Sinan Antoon’s second novel. Antoon has also published two collections of poetry (only Baghdad Blues is available in English) and translated Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence, which will be forthcoming from Archipelago next spring.
If you’re looking for it, there are a number of places to seek out excellent Arab American poets. They are celebrated individually (Khaled Mattawa just won a major poetry award) and as a group, as in the most recent Banipal (38).
CAIRO I think tonight, June 11, I’m going to the signing of Khaled al-Berry’s new novel (I have strongly recommended his memoir, Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise). I don’t […]
Above is the beautiful cover of Sinan Antoon‘s new novel The Pomegranate Alone, designed by Mohammad Al-Shammarey. The book should be out in the next two weeks from al-Mu’assassa ‘l-`Arabiyya […]
Sinan Antoon responded to my book request just after I’d posted the list for Take the Arabic Lit Summer Reading Challenge, and Win. If you don’t know who Antoon is, […]
Well, perhaps this one was a bit morbid: The “Five Before You Die” was a feature we ran back in the summer 2010; by now, there are now many more […]