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whatulysses's review against another edition
4.0
"It is my fate / like this, like this, to kiss / the creases around the eyes and the eyes / that they may recognize each other..." - Fayetteville as in Fate
Really good as political speech. Not my favorite type of poetry, but the words do other work for to which directness and clarity are well suited and I enjoyed them.
Really good as political speech. Not my favorite type of poetry, but the words do other work for to which directness and clarity are well suited and I enjoyed them.
elise_lh's review against another edition
5.0
“Tell me who ate the cherries. / They were in a small bowl in the back of the refrigerator. / They were for me, because / Syria remembers. / I was / sure of it.”
samisal's review
adventurous
funny
reflective
sad
fast-paced
4.75
The poetry in this book is playful and irreverent and heavy and personal. I really love reading Arab-American feminist writing from earlier generations than my own, but even within that category I find this book so sweet and clear in its conceptions of identity. It feels timeless in a way and offers me some brightness for future imaginings.
tymelgren's review against another edition
3.0
Last semester I based one of my seminar papers partly on another of Mohja Kahf's poetry collections, HAGAR POEMS. I loved that book for its imaginative portrayal of the figure of Hagar/Hajar, and for the warm and funny and startling things it had to say about the immigrant experience and religion and God and the ways in which people do or don't relate to each other. This is a much earlier collection of Kahf's, the poems here having been written between 1983 and 2001. The themes are similar - ancient women imagined into the present day, exile, simultaneous frustration with and longing for religion - but the ideas aren't as focused and the images and language aren't as memorable as they become in HAGAR POEMS. The best poems here are the ones in which Kahf confronts global human rights issues, notably birth defects caused by the United States' use of radioactive bombs during the Gulf War, or the grief of being a homeless refugee in an unfamiliar country. I'm sure I'll read more of Kahf's books, and I enjoyed reading this one, but it ended up mostly feeling like early practice for ideas later perfected in her poems about Hagar.
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