Shrapnel Maps - Softcover

Metres, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556595638 ISBN 13: 9781556595639

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2020

Synopsis

Writing into the wounds and reverberations of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Philip Metres’ fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, is at once elegiac and activist, an exploratory surgery to extract the slivers of cartography through palimpsest and erasure. A wedding in Toura, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, uneasy interactions between Arab and Jewish neighbors in University Heights, the expulsion of Palestinians in Jaffa, another bombing in Gaza: Shrapnel Maps traces the hurt and tender places, where political noise turns into the voices of Palestinians and Israelis. Working with documentary flyers, vintage postcards, travelogues, cartographic language, and first person testimonies, Shrapnel Maps ranges from monologue sonnets to prose vignettes, polyphonics to blackouts, indices to simultaneities, as Palestinians and Israelis long for justice and peace, for understanding and survival.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Metres is the author and translator of eleven books and chapbooks, including The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan 2018); Pictures at an Exhibition (University of Akron 2016);; Sand Opera (Alice James 2015); and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State Poetry Center, 2015). Recipient of two NEA fellowships, the Lannan Fellowship, and , two Arab American Book Awards, he is a professor of English and the director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

One Tree
They wanted to tear down the tulip tree, our neighbors, last year. It throws a shadow over their vegetable patch, the only tree in our backyard. We said no. Now they’ve hired someone to chainsaw an arm―the crux on our side of the fence―and my wife, in tousled hair and morning sweat, marches to stop the carnage, mid-limb. It reminds her of her childhood home, a shady place to hide. She recites her litany of no’s, returns. Minutes later, the neighbors emerge. The worker points to our unblinded window. I want to say, it’s not me, slide out of view behind a wall of cupboards, ominous breakfast table, steam of tea, our two young daughters now alone. I want no trouble. Must I fight for my wife’s desire for yellow blooms when my neighbors’ tomatoes will stunt and blight in shade? Always the same story: two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love. Like the baby brought to Solomon, someone must give. Dear neighbor, it’s not me. Bloom-shadowed, light-deprived, they lower the chainsaw again.

excerpt from When It Rains in Gaza

for Deema Shehabi
VIII.
When it rains in Gaza, children run out

of noise, lift their open lips to heaven.
IX. White Phosphorus
A jellyfish of smoke,

you say aloud, look!―
the beautiful photo’s

white tentacles and head
swim the sky

before they fall. A privacy
of glass. Ripples

of division. Flesh
from flesh, true god

from true god, made
in the walled

island of unforgiven
not not forgotten, dreaming

where the past will lead.
X.
When it rained in Gaza, the ancient graves

of Beit Hanoun revealed themselves again.
ورق
(
of barbed wire I clear a line

sharp enough to ribbon the flesh
(
& the village, where Omar nests

in his palm a bird whose wing is broken
(
he strokes & holds to his lips

coffee with cardamom & the circle of men:
(
all day, nearby, some machine putts

as if trying to set the whole village to
(
motion: it won’t start

but something is happening, or will:

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 1556595638
• ISBN 13: 9781556595639
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 170