Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation : Poems

This critically-acclaimed translation of Iraqi author Amal al-Jubouri contextualizes America's occupation of Iraq through the Qur'an's story of Hagar. Complementary pairs of poems portray life before and after the war. This work simultaneously mirrors Hagar's desperate running between Safa and Marwah, as we pace frantically between pre- and post-occupation Iraq—the poet begging in vain for poetry not to abandon her people.
 
"Amal al-Jubouri's poems are essentially about exile, exile from the country of her youth, exile from peace, from love, from normalcy, from hope. They are courageous, honest, bitter, and beautiful. They are as ghosts, wandering over the rivers, looking for a home. I want to ask forgiveness of these ghosts. And rock them to sleep. I bless the Iraqi dead, as she does." — Gerald Stern

"Poet and translator Rebecca Gayle Howell has transported Amal al-Jubouri's moving cri de coeur across the precarious bridge between Arabic and English as well as the cultural, political, and ethical chasm separating Iraq and the United States. This is poetry necessary to our times, and we owe the makers of this work in English an enormous debt of gratitude." — Carolyn Forché

"Through these poems, Amal al-Jubouri connects us to the earliest known poems, and yet the dialectic tension between them is utterly contemporary. Al-Jubouri writes "This is my protest, this is my folly," yet these poems are neither simple protest nor in any sense folly. These poems are both essential and eternal." — Nick Flynn

Amal Al-Jubouri was born in Iraq, and is the author of five collections of poetry, including This Body is Yours, Do Not Fear for My Sake, which received the prize for best Arabic book at the Beirut book fair. She has also translated many plays and collections of poetry into Arabic. In 1997, she fled Iraq for Europe and settled in Münich. She is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of al-Diwan, the Arab-German literary magazine, and since 2001, has presided as Chairman of the Board for the East-West gathering for Arabic-German cultural exchange, in Berlin. Her most recent book,Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation, translated by Rebecca Gayle Howell, is her first collection in English.

Rebecca Gayle Howell is an award-winning writer, translator, and editor. Her Best Book of the Year honors include those from Best Translated Book Awards, Foreword Reviews INDIES Awards, The Banipal Prize, Ms. Magazine, Library Journal, Book Riot, and Poets & Writers. Among Howell's awards are the United States Artists Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the Carson McCullers Fellowship, and two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Alicia Ostriker is a major American poet and critic. Twice nominated for a National Book Award, she is author of twelve volumes of poetry. As a critic, Ostriker is the author of two pathbreaking volumes on women's poetry and has also published three books on the Bible.