Where do you live? by Jennifer Jean and Hanaa Ahmad Jabr
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.
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.
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.
