Evoking the sights, sounds, and tastes of contemporary life, the poets in Home explore the intimate, delightful, agonizing, and contradictory elements that surround them on a daily basis. A glass shatters in a neighbor's sink followed by the stomping of "little feet"; a woman falls asleep on the shoulder of a man she doesn't know on an airplane; and a man passes his time smoking alone a caf, observing the charge of activity all around him. The worlds these poets traverse are not devoid of politics, wars, and global migrations, and yet by taking the minutiae of everyday life as their subject they remind us of the need to periodically turn inward and find meaning in the specific and deeply personal.
Featuring work by Iman Mersal (Egypt), Samir Abu Hawwash (Palestine), Ines Abassi (Tunisia), Fadhil al-Azzawi (Iraq) and others, this second book in the Calico series introduces readers to contemporary voices from across the Arabic-speaking world that are sorely underrepresented in the United States. Beautifully rendered into English by some of today's leading Arabic translators, these poems are presented en face with their Arabic originals in a bilingual collection that celebrates language and its power to transform even the most familiar surroundings into obscure landscapes for us to inhabit, if just for a moment.