Online Selection of Poems:
Vista poets.org
GHAZAL 4 plumepoetry.com
Migrant Earth poets.org
HÜZÜN theadirondackreview.org
Gate of Freedom poets.org
Two Poems: Pantoum, A Dream of Cetaceans bigother.com
Eminent Domain Tanka cordite.org.au
Of Harvest and Flight valpo.eu
Lights Across the Dead Sea drunkenboat.com
Portrait of Summer in Bossey drunkenboat.com
GHAZAL: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World rustedradishes.com
Interviews:
INTERVIEW WITH DEEMA SHEHABI
BY LIZ CASTELLANO
I interviewed Palestinian-American poet Deema K. Shehabi. Shehabi was born in Kuwait in 1970. Her father is from Jerusalem and her mother is from Gaza. She came to the United States in 1998 to study at Tufts University and currently resides in California. This interview was conducted via email. After the interview is my personal response, a reflection of my experience as student studying the conflict and as a second hand witness to Deema Shehabi’s story as a Palestinian-American woman.
More than a homeland
Meeting poets Marilyn Hacker and Deema Shehabi and talking about their unique collaboration sparked by the 2008-2009 Gaza war.
Interview by Sousan Hammad
Writes Marilyn:
Her name on a leaf
of paper above the sea.
His name spray-painted
on a concrete wall. My name’s
hesitant calligraphy
in a new notebook.
Their names linked by an echo
in an empty street
The town's name where they were born.
Please write your name for me here.
And Deema:
The names of the villages razed
in 1948 stitched with golden thread
on a black tent in the Made in Palestine
exhibit in Houston. The names
of my uncle’s daughters, each
dimpling and swelling with kisses:
Wafaa, Areej, Shaden, Loubna.
The naming and unnaming
We argued about in poems:
Darfur, Gaza, Isdoud, Yaffa.
Muslim America in Poetry: A Conversation with Deema Shehabi and Kazim Ali
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
Deema Shehabi: Poetry is an act of cognizant observation, of transformative listening and of ebbed consciousness. In quietude a poet can apprehend (even when fleeting) the sense of what’s sacred and what’s otherworldly in a seemingly quotidian scene. Poetry brings us closer to that vacuous space that looks and reflects upon the interior. The poet Mary Oliver, in the poem “White Owl Flies Into And Out of the Field” writes of a “scalding/aortal light—/in which we are washed and washed out of our bones.” Her rendering in language of this metamorphic, sacred light is only possible because of observation and sustained attention to what’s sacred in the everyday.
Book Reviews:
If you want the news about Palestine, walk through the hall of distorting mirrors that is our media. If you want the truth about the Palestinian experience, read Deema Shehabi's debut poetry collection, Thirteen Departures from the Moon. Arresting every communicable feature of language, this poet sings the haunted songs of war, occupation, exile, and abiding love, imploring readers to remember, each moment, that the political is and always has been painfully personal.
The poems in Fady Joudah’s Tethered to Stars reflect a poet’s pinnacle, where readers experience the vision of a virtuosic poet who possesses multiple registers and allusive riches, transforming them into a polyphonic symphony. This is a poet who slays artificially constructed boundaries of what constitutes text by hybridizing earthly and spiritual crevices, narrative and lyric breaths, and finally the cosmic body itself within its material manifestations. Sometimes, the reader is left breathless and in awe. At other times, we continue to ponder what lingers through the music, namely, indelible images or multiplicitous voices as they rise to crescendo.
“Specks of the Universe”: Fady Joudah’s Tethered to Stars
by Deema K. Shehabi
The Butterfly’s Burden
Mahmoud Darwish
Reviewed by Deema K. Shehabi
Since his first volumes appeared in English, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has been captivating his readers with a highly distinctive, imaginative, yet rooted language steeped in the telling and retelling of luminous myths, exilic histories, and prophecies on love and nature. The Butterfly’s Burden, his latest book, constitutes three recent volumes of poetry: The Stranger’s Bed (1998), Darwish’s first collection of love poems; A State of Siege (2002) and Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done (2003), both distilled from the political realities of displacement and occupation, and the role of the recreated (ultimately indestructible) poetic “I” (the self) in those afflictions. The result is a lyrically buoyant conversation addressing the experience of exile; the simultaneous heaviness and lightness of that particular tension will remain etched in the reader’s mind long after reading.
Selected Videos:
Diaspo/Renga
Poetry by Deema K. Shehabi & Marilyn Hacker
Qasida of Breath
Poetry by Deema K. Shehabi
Music by Mitchell Covington
This piece was commissioned and premiered by Voci Women's Vocal Ensemble (Oakland, CA)