Description
Where Do You Live? is both the title and the driving question at the heart of this epistolary poetic dialogue between two poets scarred by the fire of war-Iraqi poet Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr and American poet Jennifer Jean. Poem by poem, ably co-translated by Wadaq Qais and Tamara Al-Attiya, these two poets find themselves reaching each other-touching across tongues-in this sisterhood of poems, despite the vast geographical and cultural distances between Mosul and Massachusetts, Iraq, and America, states formerly at war. But in Jean's words, "like love, music is perfectly untranslatable-/it gathers us together." And in Jabr's words, since poetry "introduced me to myself," in these poems we can be gathered and introduced to our widest selves. Jean and Jabr speak to each other, and us, about the stories that nurture, and the damage caused by the fantasts of power; of the pincered peril and the anxious peace of empire; of the hoped-for serenity and call to duty of neighborhoods, children and apricot trees; of myths and movies. A beautiful rumination on soft and hard power, and on what it's like to live with the yearning for home, whether you're there or not. It will hit you where you live.
ISBN 9798990405073
