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What to Count
Alise Alousi
With heart and insight, the poems in Alise Alousi’s What to Count speak to what it means to come of age as an Iraqi American during the first Gulf War and its continuing aftermath, but also to the joy and complexity of motherhood, daughterhood, and what it means to live a creative life. More than a description of the world, Alousi’s poetry actively lives in and of the world. These poems explore the nuances of memory through the changes wrought by time, conflict, and distance. In "The Ocularist" and "Art," and others, Alousi’s extraordinary verbal deftness precisely locates the still-tender pains and triumphs of collective being while trying to be an individual in the world. What to Count is a remarkable collection of contemporary poetry—both a lyrical splendor and a contemplative account of lineage, silenced history, and identity.
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Alise Alousi writes as an Iraqi American, a Detroiter, a daughter, a mother, and a citizen who refuses to let injustices slide, who is sensitive to the darker passages of our history, who counts people who would otherwise be counted out. She is a poet of witness and solace.
– Edward Hirsch, author of Gabriel: A Poem
As though the ocular cavity may hold an eternity in the ‘sliver of the everyday,’ Alise Alousi’s poems create cinematic dimensions beyond sight as they subtly, gently navigate her father’s loss of sight—emblematic of the loss of all the multiplicities that define the speaker. It takes great prowess to shape ‘memory / into a spoon,’ as Alousi does, nourishing the spirit by revealing and recovering the past.
– Shadab Zeest Hashmi, author of Ghazal Cosmopolitan and Comb
We Call to the Eye & the Night
Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage
Edited by Hala Alyan & Zeina Hashem Beck
We Call to the Eye & the Night gathers almost two-hundred vibrant English-language love poems by contemporary writers of Arab descent, including eminent poets and those who have just begun to make their mark. With roots in diverse countries, they represent a breathtaking intersection of voices, experiences, and perspectives. Their poems divulge secret yearnings, discover the remarkable in the everyday, and conjure people and places that resonate after they are gone. Featured, of course, are evocative explorations of love and of the beloved; there are also poems of friendship and family, heritage and homeland, transporting us from city centers to the depths of the sea and to the stars above.
Exquisitely curated and introduced by acclaimed authors Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck, We Call to the Eye & the Night is at once sexy, sensuous, adventurous, nostalgic, and iconoclastic—a treasury of love emanating from the Arab world and its diaspora.