I enjoyed this poetry collection quite a bit. I was expecting more political pieces, which I don't usually seek out, but there were not as many as I anticipated, and the ones included were well written and not what I had expected.

While I couldn't relate to every one of Halaby's poems, there were quite a few that I connected with. Even though I have never dealt with the same cross-culture & mixed-race issues that were addressed in several of the poems, I have dealt with similar emotions among my own peer groups. Classic high school drama, now that I can look back on it, but I recognized many of the same emotions I felt about that time in my life while reading these poems.

My favorite poem in this collection is the second poem of "The Journey"; the following lines make me feel like Laila Halaby is writing what is in my head:

"...demanded validation / as a woman / as an Arab / as a writer / and then / when no one wanted my stories / and no one cared where I was born / where my father was from / why I looked the way I did / ...I had become exactly who I always wanted to be: a normal person whose labels were irrelevant"

"Motherhood" is another favorite, and I found myself returning to the first poem of Halaby's reflection on Khaled Mattawa's reading numerous times as well.


*received a digital copy free through netGalley ( )

Halaby draws on her experiences as an Arab American to explore the duality of her experience and her general sense of homelessness. The poems read like passages from a memoir, illustrating her relation to two cultures, neither of which seem to fit properly. Her personal life mixes with her reactions to world events, such as the Iraq war or the bombing of Palestine.

You can tell that Halaby was a fiction writer first, because her poems tend toward narrative. However, this is not simply prose broken up into lines. The lines of her poetry goes from long lines to short, choppy lines, which emphasis words and phrases to effectively evoke the imagery, metaphor, and disjointed emotions presented. On the whole this is a beautiful and intellectual book of poetry. ( )

aila Halaby was born in Lebanon to a Jordanian father and American mother, she grew up mostly in Arizona. She is the author of two novels, West of Jordan (2003; winner of a Pen Beyond Margins Award) and Once in a Promised Land (2007). She holds an undergraduate degree in Italian and Arabic from Washington University (St Louis), she was also a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship for the study of Jordanian folklore, which resulted in a collection of Palestinian folktales for children. In addition, she also writes poetry which is highly personal, reflecting the disparity between the places and cultures she grew up within.
In this, her first collection of poetry, she uses a narrative style to explore what it means to be an outsider within your own culture, of trying to navigate between the two identities of Arab and American, and how this reflects on her as as women and as a writer. The poems in this collection span about twenty years, giving it almost the appearance of a memoir, detailing the heartaches and struggles, the dilemmas that have confronted & puzzled her, the experiences that she faced as an individual viewed as “Arab” in a post 9/11 world with all the grief and anger, all the hope that things could be better / different that went with living through such times. “My name on his tongue”, is about identity; found or lost, is about relationships; those that made it and those that fell by the wayside, it’s about war & peace and the murky wasteland that divides the two. “My name on his tongue” is a beautiful lyrical reflection, that is both personal and political as are all stories that highlight an individual’s identity and how it relates to a geographical line on a map.


After a reading by Khaled Mattawa (a Libyan poet living in the US).

Your place in the world is solid

my place in the world moves without a

schedule

is based on mishaps

unwanted affairs

political discord

my place drifts

between Here and There West and East

sometimes gets lodged In-Between

my place is a Somewhere that cannot be found

on any map

was detached

as I was Born

in a place that belonged to neither of my parents

can’t be an immigrant

if you haven’t left somewhere can’t be a native

if you’re from somewhere else which is why I'm

fluent in the language of exiled souls

(Excerpt from: After a reading by Khaled Mattawa) ( )