Threa Almontaser

This book left me with more questions than I started it with, but there were some poems I did like.

My favorites:
p36 Guide to Gardening Your Roots (after Natalie Diaz)--I have read 2 of Diaz's collections and astill don't get the reference. I especially liked the section about her father--missing a place that no longer exists as he knew it. The writing is strong and evocative.

p43 Yemen Rising as Poorest Country in the World. This actually has much of the same feel as the section about her father in poem above.

All of the poems that are about Yemen I found interesting--she evokes the place. Her poems touching on America mostly confused me--Yemen is desert America not, and it seems to consist of Muslim outcasts and white people. That's it. Yemeni-Americans are defined as Muslim, Americans are described as white (though many Americans of all colors/ethnicities would touch on their religion as a main identifier--just as she does, and she IS American). She was born in NY and now lives in NC--places I have not been since I was a kid. She teaches English to immigrants and refugees, so clearly she knows America is not as simple as she portrays it in this collection, yet there it is.… (mer)

Just as Monica Sok in her "A Nail the Evening Hangs On" which I read earlier this year, Threa Almontaser uses her immigrant parents' history and her own family upbringing as half American, half something else to create a powerful collection. In this case the something else is Yemeni - a Muslim black woman, growing up in a country that can be challenging for anyone who is different.

The collection is split into three parts - the first is mostly set in USA, the second in Yemen and the third goes pretty much anywhere. In between there are dreams and the nightmares, the Yemen of today and yesterday, the horrors of war and the hope of a girl in USA, the post 9/11 changes for the Muslim communities and the craft a woman who knows who she is. The poetry is peppered with Arabic words - some in English letters, some in Arabic ones - none of them has a translation and while a lot of them can be figured out from the context, looking them up can surprise you sometimes.

Almontaser uses a mix of Arabic and English numerals to separate the parts of her poems and the mix is not random. Each of the three parts of the collection (Arabic numerals are used for these) are prefixed with photos, with the eyes of the people on them scratched out. I am not sure why and the book does not say anything about it (there are notes on some of the poetry but none on the images) but they are haunting...

In addition to her own poetry, Almontaser includes also two translations - two poems by the Yemeni poet Abdullah Al-Baradouni, translated by Almontaser herself. The styles of the two poets are very different - Al-Baradouni is a lot more lyrical and a lot more poetic and has an almost classical feeling. Almontaser on the other hand is more modern and feels more like an American poet who has roots in the Arabic language and world than an Arabic language poet (as little as I had read poetry which was initially written in Arabic). Which is normal after all - she is born in America.

The collection is a love letter to Yemen and an attempt to show what it is to be Yemeni abroad. It can be rough in places and not all poems work with the same power but as a whole, it makes you pay attention and never let you walk away.… (mer)