Nettles: Poems » (First Edition)

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.

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.