Nettles: Poems - Softcover

Khoury-Ghata, Vénus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974872 ISBN 13: 9781555974879

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2008

Synopsis

The new collection by the Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata, the author of She Says, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

it could only have been elsewhere
the sun's anger overturned the country
men who came from the wounded side of the river knocked
on our borders
I say men so as not to say locusts
―from "Nettles"

In Nettles, Vénus Khoury-Ghata brings her impulses for lyric poetry and for stark narrative together into four enchanting sequences. Each confronts the realities of womanhood, immigration, and cultural conflict with an imagination and history born from both the Arabic and French languages. Masterfully translated by
Marilyn Hacker, Nettles gives American readers this utterly original, indispensable poetry.

About this title

About the Author:

Vénus Khoury-Ghata is a Lebanese poet and novelist, the author of the poetry collection She Says and the novel A House at the Edge of Tears (both translated by Marilyn Hacker). She has been a resident of France since 1973.

Marilyn Hacker is a National Book Award-winning poet and the translator from French of several contemporary poets. She lives in Paris and New York, where she is a professor of English and Creative Writing at City College.

From Publishers Weekly:

Mournful, erotic, bewildering, often shocking, and always passionate over losses public and private, the Lebanese Francophone poet Khoury-Ghata's five new verse sequences-brought into convincing English by the Paris-based Hacker-should win her some American recognition. A prolific novelist as well as a poet, Khoury-Ghata here uses her talent for narrative together with her post-Surrealist sense of description and line. The first two sequences react at once to the deaths of the poet's husband, brother and mother, and to the wider dilemma of diaspora and refugees in and out of the Arab world. Khoury-Ghata (herself long resident in France) depicts a symbolic family as if in a vivid dream: "The mother arranges the marbles by size and sadness/ the child will play with them when he's less dead." The longest sequence follows the life of a village, and of a woman who leaves it, portraying scenes at once recognizably Near Eastern and hauntingly placed outside time. Shorter, but no less fiery, closing sequences pursue metaphors from nautical life and address recent Lebanese refugees. Khoury-Ghata's recent works are a cluster of cyclones in a world of light breezes and some readers may argue over how they fit together .
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About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1555974872
• ISBN 13: 9781555974879
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120