Khaled Mattawa

Tocqueville

The Poet's Art and His Nation

Mahmoud Darwish

Khaled Mattawa’s poetry contains “the complexity of a transnational identity” (MacArthur Fellowship citation) Fugitive Atlas is a sweeping, impassioned account of refugee crises, military occupations, and ecological degradation, an acute and probing journey through a world in upheaval. Khaled Mattawa’s chorus of speakers finds moments of profound solace in searching for those lost—in elegy and prayer—even when the power of poetry and faith seems incapable of providing salvation. With extraordinary formal virtuosity and global scope, these poems turn not to lament for those regions charted as theaters of exploitation and environmental malpractice but to a poignant amplification of the lives, dreams, and families that exist within them. In this exquisite collection, Mattawa asks how we are expected to endure our times, how we inherit the journeys of our ancestors, and how we let loose those we love into an unpredictable world.

Poems

Fugitive Atlas

Patrick Donnelly

Gay & Lesbian market. Powerful new voice.

The Charge

Joe Sacco

Eileen Myles

Bao Phi

Naomi Shihab Nye

Ahdaf Soueif

Natalie Diaz

Hisham Matar

Yazan Khalili

George Abraham

Hala Alyan

Najwan Darwish

Sahar Mustafah

Naomi Wallace

Kevin Coval

Marc Lamont Hill

Jehan Bseiso

Nathalie Handal

Fargo Tbakhi

Ed Bok Lee

Donal O'Kelly

Fady Joudah

Zaina Alsous

Najla Said

Ismail Khalidi

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Lina AlSharif

Janan Alexandra

Zeina Azzam

Bryonn Bain

Summer Farah

Mandy Shunnarah

Marking seventy years of displacement and occupation in Palestine, Mizna presents The Palestine Issue, centering the Palestinian struggle for liberation and the rich literature it has spurred, guest edited by playwright and poet Ismail Khalidi. Acclaimed authors engage with seven decades of resilience and creativity in the face of catastrophe, sharing work that combats erasure by remembering, as well as by imagining possible (and impossible) futures.

The Palestine Issue

Mizna

The third book by an Arab-American poet who explores the hybridization of cultures.

Amorisco

Ismalia Eclipse

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. “Like the myriad companions and comrades that he summons from their exile, Khaled Mattawa is himself a ‘poet-stranger.’ In the essays, ‘written in a poet’s prose,’ collected in How Long Have You Been With Us, Mattawa evokes a powerful amalgam of the personal intimacy of the solitary and the political challenge of solidarity.” —Barbara Harlow, University of Texas at Austin “If you’ve read about exile, you’ve read about Brodsky and Milosz—just as, if you’ve read about translation, you’ve read about Walter Benjamin and George Steiner. While Khaled Mattawa has mastered these masters, his essays about world literature serve as a tour of the rest of the world. He introduces you to the writers you haven’t heard of but should from contemporary Libya and colonial South Asia to Latin America and China. When Mattawa invokes Saadi Youssef or Rabinidrath Tagore, Mohja Kahf or Toru Dutt, the effect is to deprovincialize American literature.” —Ken Chen, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop Khaled Mattawa, an American poet of Libyan origin, explores various dynamic developments shaping American poetry as it is being practiced today. Arising from an incredibly diverse range personal backgrounds, lyric traditions, and even languages, American poetry is transforming into a truly international form. Mattawa, who also translates Arabic poetry into American English and American poetry into Arabic, explores the poetics and politics of cross-cultural exchange and literary translation that fostered such transformation. The essays in this collection also shed light on Mattawa’s development as a poet and provide numerous portraits of the poets who helped shaped his poetry.

Essays on Poetry

How Long Have You Been With Us?

“On the bridges to those slippery worlds, we are wrapped in gold foil, disease free. Who is saving whom? The question’s not stated, only implied.” In 2013, the Italian government implemented Mare Nostrum, an operation intended to limit immigration from Africa and the Middle East to European countries. For the refugees, the journeys were harrowing, often ending in shipwrecks or imprisonment, and the arrivals were wracked with uncertainty. Here, the poet Khaled Mattawa conjures a pointed, incantatory account of the refugee experience in the Mediterranean. In reclaiming the operation's name Mare Nostrum (our sea in Latin), he renders us culpable for the losses, and responsible to those risking their lives in pursuit of hope and respite from oppression. The voices are many, and the lyrics ritualistic, as if Mattawa has stirred ghosts from the wreckage. Part narrative, part blessing, this chapbook begs of its readers: Do you remember? Mattawa’s writing is a lighthouse for politics of the twenty-first century, and this chapbook a stunning memorial.

Mare Nostrum

Amjad Nāṣir

?Shepherd of Solitude is the first English collection for Jordanian poet Amjad Nasser, translated and introduced by the foremost translator of contemporary Arabic poetry into English Khaled Mattawa, with the poems selected by poet and translator from the poets Arabic volumes over the years 1979 to 2004.

Selected Poems, 1979-2004

Shepherd of Solitude

Poetry. "In his masterful fourth collection, Khaled Mattawa is concerned, above all, with the ramifications of a new global culture that most American poets have thus far ignored and neglected, partly out of incomprehension, partly out of fear. By setting himself against such timidity, Mattawa offers his most sustained and experimental reckoning with matters of cultural and social witness. TOCQUEVILLE is part personal lyric, part jeremiad, part shooting script, and part troubled homage to the great wry chronicler of American society evoked in the book's title. It is a book of relentless invention that is also relentlessly urgent and that is a very rare thing indeed. Khaled Mattawa is, quite simply, one of the finest, fiercest, and most original poets of his generation"--David Wojahn.

His first book, was enthusiastically received. Mattawa received the prestigious Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.

Zodiac of Echoes

Pauline Kaldas

This anthology brings together the voices of both new and established Arab American writers in a compilation of creative nonfiction that reveals the stories of the Arab diaspora in styles that range from the traditional to the experimental. Writers from Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, and Syria explore issues related to politics, family, culture, and racism. Coming from different belief systems and cultures and including first- and second-generation immigrants as well as those whose identities encompass more than a single culture, these writers tell stories that speak to the complexity of the Arab American experience.

An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Creative Nonfiction

Beyond Memory

Munir Akash

Presents a collection of poetry, fiction, essays, and dramas by Arab American authors.

Anthology of New Arab American Writing

Post Gibran

Adonis

"Frontispiece: Poem and calligraphy by Adonis, XXXX. Translated by Bassam Frangieh" --T.p. verso.

Selected Poems

The first edition of Dinarzad’s 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 —thirty in all—and 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.

An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction

Dinarzad's Children

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.

Khaled Mattawa

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