A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor: Selected Poems »

Maram al-Massri was born in Latakia, Syria, in 1962, and has lived in France since 1982. She has published three collections in Arabic, and her poems have been translated into many languages, with books published in French and Spanish. Khaled Mattawa was born in Libya and came to the United States in his teens. He is the author of Zodiac of Echoes and Ismailia Eclipse, and the translator of three volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA translation grant.

First American publication of Syrian poet Maram al-Massri, presented in a bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Publishers Weekly

Short, vivid, frankly erotic and remarkable for their emotional intelligence, Syrian poet Al-Massri's poems are as startling in English as they must have been to their first Arabic readers. Her acute renditions of pain and pleasure are more than a bit suggestive of Catullus-or rather a female Catullus, whose mix of the familial and the bodily, of worries about motherhood with expression of lust, first shock, then draw admiration for their concise artistry: "Before you fell asleep," a one-sentence poem asks a lover or husband, "why did you forget/ to switch off/ the lamp/ of my burning desires?" A lover appears "in his old cotton clothes/ and his torn socks," "the way the need for love/ strips naked." A woman with unconsummated yearnings compares herself to a fruit tree the birds leave alone. A happier woman, at the end of a tryst, will "search for pieces/ of my clothes/ to wear me," leaving only "tears/ of pleasure" behind. Mattawa renders the traditional Middle Eastern forms of Al-Massri's lyric sequences into brief English free verse. The results sound just familiar enough to draw Americans in, just strange enough to keep them in memory. (Nov.)