A review by manureads
The Good Arabs by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

THE GOOD ARABS by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch: “The energy it takes to fight across a table about the importance of human life is disastrous & yet we must do it & yet we must trY” - From: & if my people

There’s being Arab & there’s being queer & then there is the intersection of the two where this collection fits beautifully. Travelling from post-explosion Beirut to Montreal in the summer, The Good Arabs is an exploration of identity: first at the personal level, what it means to be queer and trans and to feel at home in your body, and also at the macro level, what makes you arab & what is the line between being a tourist or being at home in your family’s country.

I’m not sure what makes a good poetry collection, other than when I get the tingling « this sentence makes me feel things » feeling, over and over. There are deeply intimate details to me in those poems, I was surprised to find them there, but they scratched that need of being seen so nicely, of course I enjoyed it. Objectively, however, there is also a lot to love. Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch has beautiful prose and shows us they also master form - there is a vilannelle in there, which is a form difficult to get right! Overall, I highly recommend you read this, there is a lot to discover. 

“My Khalo is dead and for today, I hold space only for this singular grief. Tomorrow I will grieve my country.” - from: Do You Run When You Hear the Sound of a Loud Crack