Drawn from a decade of writing and conversations by Arab American poet and writer Philip Metres, Dispatches from the Land of Erasure redefines the writer’s role as a catalyst for justice and a resister of empire. Gathering together a wide range of writing and writers, particularly from Arab and Black diaspora, Dispatches reports on what white imperial culture attempts to erase, while uplifting the voices and people who resist that erasure, offering a vision of a more just...

Dynamically pairing traditional and experimental forms, Philip Metres traces ancient and modern migrations in an investigation of the ever-shifting idea of home.In Fugitive/Refuge, Philip Metres follows the journey of his refugee ancestors—from Lebanon to Mexico to the United States—in a vivid exploration of what it means to long for home. A book-length qasida, the collection draws on both ancient traditions and innovative forms—odes and arabics, sonnets a...

Writing into the wounds and reverberations of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Philip Metres’ fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, is at once elegiac and activist, an exploratory surgery to extract the slivers of cartography through palimpsest and erasure. A wedding in Toura, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, uneasy interactions between Arab and Jewish neighbors in University Heights, the expulsion of Palestinians in Jaffa, another bombing in Gaza: Shrapnel Maps traces the hu...

Wrestling with the questions of travel, memory, and perception, Pictures at an Exhibition: A Petersburg Album is, at its core, an unrequited love song to St. Petersburg. The fever dream of Peter the Great, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Akhmatova, St. Petersburg is the occasion for a broader meditation on all we come to love and lose. Pictures began as a journal notebook in 2002, as the poet tried to capture this spectacle-rich and memory-laden city that he had visited ten years before. ...

Philip Metres stakes a claim for the cultural work that poems can perform—from providing refuge to embodying resistance, from recovering silenced voices to building a more just world, in communities of solitude and solidarity. Gathering a decade of his writing on poetry, he widens our sense of poetry as a way of being in the world, proposing that poems can offer a permeability to marginalized voices and a shelter from the imperial noise and despair that can silence us. The Sound of Lis...

Muriel Rukeyser has many faces: poet, biographer, theorist, playwright, novelist, story-writer, filmmaker, translator, ethnographer, and innovator of social, documentary poetics; feminist, queer, Jewish, single mother, and social justice activist. Yet above all, she was a poet. Threaded through her work, politics, and life was the conviction that poetry is an animating force that connects people and disciplines. Recent years have seen a surge of renewed interest in Rukeyser’s work, bringin...

Sign & Breath is a new critical anthology that takes a different approach to exploring these questions: What is poetry? What defines voice? Featuring a range of contemporary artists, many of whom work across different mediums and genres, Sign & Breath introduces the reader to one page that sings in any genre – prose, fiction, poetry, spoken word, hybrid forms, and song – across diverse traditions. Rather than define poetry as a genre with conventions, traditions, codes, a...

A Sense of Regard, says Laura McCullough, “is an effort to collect the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and considered exfoliation of the current confluence of poetry and race, the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared, the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic camps and biases.”The contributors discuss issues as various as their own diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their essays, which range in style from the personal and lyric...

Poetry criticism is a subject central to the study of literature. However, it is laden with technical terms that, to the beginning student, can be both intimidating and confusing. Philip Hobsbaum provides a welcome remedy, illuminating terms ranging from the iambus to the bob-wheel stanza, and forms from the Spenserian sonnet to modern 'rap', with clarity and comprehensiveness. It is an essential guide through the terminology which will be invaluable reading for undergraduates new to the s...