The Good Arabs

Book excerpt: Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker's geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, family both biological and chosen, and community. In mapping Arab and trans identity through the remnants of trauma, the garbage crisis in Lebanon, the ways countries let down their citizens, and the immensity of experience felt in one body, the genre-defying collection The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.