"Maram al-Massri comes as a shock. She writes about all the taboo subjects-physical passion, faithlessness, adultery, loneliness, despair-with candor and intensity that would mark her out even to Westerners."-The Times (London)

"Her direct, unadorned writing, with its emphasis on the quotidian, and utilization of simple, almost child-like metaphors, contrast sharply with the conventions of traditional Arabic love poetry."-Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature

Syrian poet Maram al-Massri writes of love and the place of women in the modern age with striking candor and intensity. "I am this mix between the submissive and rebellious woman," she writes, "my freedom is so difficult and so desired." Her poems invoke a world where women are trapped and men flow freely, of the intoxicating power of seduction and the intensity of lust, of the security of relationships and muffled explosions of emotion.

Like grains of salt they shone then melted. This is how they disappeared, those men who did not love me.

Al-Massri herself straddles racial, religious, and cultural worlds. Born in Latakia, Syria, she moved to Paris in 1984 and has since refused to return: "I divorced from my past, my religion, my land, and even from my language." Despite being fluent in French and English, she writes in Arabic, following traditional forms.

A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor is al-Massri's first book published in the United States, and appears in a bilingual Arabic-English edition.

This collection features poems from Al-Azzawi's six previous Arabic poetry collections and many new poems. Springing from classical Arabic poetry, his poems speak to political exile, -cultural marginalization, and Middle Eastern and Western histories and mythologies. Al-Azzawi employs -humor, melancholy and tenderness to celebrate new worlds of possibility.

Fadhil Al-Azzawi was born in 1940 in Kirkuk, Iraq. By the time he was -fifteen, he was publishing poems in the leading Arab literary magazines in Beirut and Baghdad. Al-Azzawi -currently lives in London.

Khaled Mattawa (Translator) is the author of a -collection of poetry, "Ismailia" Eclipse, and the translator of two books of contemporary Arabic poetry, Hatif Janabi's "Questions" and "Their Retinue" and Saddi Youssef's "Without an Alphabet, Without a Face."

Jahan Ramazani has written that "These dazzling lyrics and sequences create one of the most compelling portraits we have of a mind, a sensibility, a language emerging from the hybridization of cultures."

The first major career-spanning collection of the poems of Adonis, widely acknowledged as the most important poet working in Arabic today "Poetry for [Adonis] is not merely a genre or an art form but a way of thinking, something almost like mystical revelation."-Charles McGrath, New York Times Born in Syria in 1930, Adonis is one of the most celebrated poets of the Arabic-speaking world. His poems have earned international acclaim, and his influence on Arabic literature has been likened to that of T. S. Eliot's on English-language verse. This volume serves as the first comprehensive survey of Adonis's work, allowing English readers to admire the arc of a remarkable literary career through the labors of the poet's own handpicked translator, Khaled Mattawa. Daring in form and prophetic in tone, Adonis's poetry sings of both the sweet promise of eros and the problems of the self. He writes of childhood ("Your childhood is a village. / You will never cross its boundaries / no matter how far you go"); of blood, bombs, and mutilation ("Murder has changed the city's shape"); and of the anguish of exile ("'I write poetry in the language of the country that sheltered me,' said a young man who looked old"). Adonis demonstrates the poet's affection for Arabic and European lyrical traditions even as his poems work to destabilize those sensibilities. This collection positions the work of Adonis within the pantheon of the great poets of exile, including Cesar Vallejo, Joseph Brodsky, and Paul Celan, providing for English readers the most complete vision yet of the work of the man whom the cultural critic Edward Said called "today's most daring and provocative Arab poet."

A Map of Signs and Scents is a collection of sixty poems by an acclaimed poet whose life and work span Middle Eastern and Western worlds, centuries past and the vivid present, the sweep of history and the intimacy of love. Born in Jordan in 1955, Amjad Nasser has lived and worked in Beirut, Cyprus, and London. His work reflects a nuanced view of the currents of history along which individual lives play out, putting him in conversation with such poets as C. P. Cavafy, Octavio Paz, and Derek Walcott. And yet, within his peripatetic life, Nasser has produced a corpus of work that, far from evoking the alienation possible in a life of motion, puts him in deep camaraderie with the world. Through fresh translations by the award-winning poets Fady Joudah and Khaled Mattawa, readers will experience the fascinating evolution of Nasser's style through his prolific, highly praised career, starting with samples of the rich textures and fertile symbolism of his 1979 debut Praise for Another Cafe. In selections from subsequent works such as Climbing the Mountain since Gilead, The Strangers Arrive, and Life like a Broken Tale, readers will trace Nasser's work as it develops into a mature style that, while more precise and direct, confidently encompasses broad horizons.

The first edition of Dinarzadas Children was a groundbreaking and popular anthology that brought to light the growing body of short fiction being
written by Arab Americans. This expanded edition includes sixteen new stories athirty in allaand new voices and is now organized into sections that invite readers to enter the stories from a variety of directions. Here are stories that reveal the initial adjustments of immigrants, the challenges of forming relationships, the political nuances of being Arab American, the vision directed towards homeland, and the ongoing search for balance and identity.
The contributors are D. H. Melhem, Mohja Khaf, Rabih Alameddine, Rawi Hage, Laila Halaby, Patricia Sarrafian Ward, Alia Yunis, Diana Abu Jaber, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Samia Serageldin, Alia Yunis,
Joseph Geha, May Monsoor Munn, Frances Khirallah Nobel, Nabeel Abraham, Yussef El Guindi, Hedy Habra, Randa Jarrar, Zahie El Kouri, Amal Masri, Sahar Mustafah, Evelyn Shakir, David Williams, Pauline Kaldas, and Khaled Mattawa.

Hatif Janabi's poems are passionate, jolting, apocalyptic, and painful. They deal with war and death, perception and truth, drawing from his family life, his exile in Poland, the Gulf War, violence in Iraq, and his experience in the United States. The speaker in many of Janabi's poems moves from a confrontational stance to one of resigned desperation, and from coyness to deep longing, where, occasionally, hope surfaces. The associative processes and the often bizarre surreal imagery he employs are very effective in expressing his profound sense of political and spiritual alienation. Janabi is among a generation of Arab poets who, because of censorship, can speak only obliquely about the harsh reality of their lives. In these poems he has created symbolic landscapes that attempt to reveal the political, social, and psychological stresses with which suffering people live.

In Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet's Art and His Nation, Mattawa pays tribute to one of the most celebrated and well-read poets of our era. With detailed knowledge of Arabic verse and a firm grounding in Palestinian history, Mattawa explores the ways in which Darwish's aesthetics have played a crucial role in shaping and maintaining Palestinian identity and culture through decades of warfare, attrition, exile, and land confiscation. Mattawa chronicles the evolution of his poetry, from a young poet igniting resistance in occupied land to his decades in exile where his work grew in ambition and scope. In doing so, Mattawa reveals Darwish's verse to be both rooted to its place of longing and to transcend place, as it reaches for the universal and the human.

Maram al-Massri is an Arab love poet for the modern age. She writes short, seductive lyrics of astonishing clarity and piercing candour, stringing them together like pearls in a story chain. This first English translation of her work draws together poems from two sequences. Her red cherry is like red lips, a fruit or drop of blood offered for the reader to taste in the poems, but abandoned to the coldness of the white-tiled floor, the white paper of the page. Her lines are anguished but tightly reined, breaking completely with traditional Arab love poetry to draw on everyday language as well as images and metaphors remembered and reinvented from childhood and the Koran.