“Jennifer Jean and Hanaa Ahmad Jabr dare bridge the hardest gulfs: those created by the seemingly intractable conditions of national enmity and war. In concept and accomplishment, these poems manifest the types of exchanges necessary to compassion, especially as they take up powerful tensions and sisterhoods. This work is effectively dialogic, vulnerable, and brave.””
Where do you live?
by Dr. Hanaa Ahmad and Jennifer Jean
Two poets. Two women. In the great tradition of epistolary poetry, Jennifer Jean and Hanaa Ahmad Jabr, in different cultural circumstances, inflected over a great planetary arch from Mosul to Massachusetts, speak to each other, and us, about the stories that nurture, and the damage caused by the fantasts of power; of the pincered peril and the anxious peace of empire; of the hoped-for serenity and call to duty of neighborhoods, children and apricot trees; of myths and movies. In Jean’s words, “like love, music is perfectly untranslatable—/it gathers us together.” And in Jabr’s words, since poetry “introduced me to myself,” in these poems we can be gathered and introduced to our widest selves. A beautiful rumination, with exquisite translations by Wadaq Qais and Tamara Al-Attiya, on soft and hard power, and on what it’s like to live with the yearning for home, whether you’re there or not. It will hit you where you live.
“Where Do You Live? is both the title and the driving question at the heart of this lovely epistolary poetic dialogue between two poets scarred by the fire of war. Poem by poem, these two poets find themselves reaching each other—touching across tongues.”
—Philip Metres, author of Fugitive/Refuge
“These transcendent poems explore how home reveals and conceals itself, shaped by longing, memory, and transformation. One poem laments, “No homeland keeps a chest where my head can cry,” while another marvels, ‘You can live forever/in a poem.’ With clarity and humanity, Where do you live? reflects the unbroken spirit of those navigating the shifting contours of identity: ‘Mid-air miracles/akin to solid ground.’”
–Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest
Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr
Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr was born in Mosul, Iraq. She is a prize-winning poet and short story writer who has participated in critical conferences and international poetry festivals. She has a PhD of Philosophy in Arabic Literature. Her books include the poetry collections I Draw My Sorrow from His Collar, and two books of criticism: The Dialectic of Poetry and Prose in Modernist Poetry, and The Poetics of the Prose Poem. Additionally, she’s released a children’s book: Sultan and Shanidar. Hanaa teaches at the University of Mosul.
Jennifer Jean
Jennifer Jean’s poetry collections include VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool. Her resource book is Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry and she’s the editor of the forthcoming anthology Other Paths for Shahrazad: a Bilingual Anthology of Poetry by Arab Women (Tupelo Press, 2026). Her work appears in POETRY Magazine, Rattle Magazine, On the Seawall, The Common, the Los Angeles Review, on The Slowdown Podcast, and in the Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day” series. She’s received honors from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Mass Cultural Council, and the Women’s Federation for World Peace. Jennifer is an organizer for the Her Story Is collective, a faculty member at Solstice MFA, and a senior program manager at the Fine Arts Work Center.
