Selected poems, essays & reviews
Two poems in the first print issue of Equator, June 2026.
An emperor without a head resembles nothing
so much as the lips and teeth
of shells that were prophets
before they were money.
“Nocturne,” a poem. New Statesman, April 2026.
Does it end? We can’t all be blessed
With bodies arranged like horizons.
The story of Lady Liberty’s early life as an Egyptian fellaha is one I learned only recently.
[FR] “Puis-je m’arrêter?” an essay for Sensibilités, January 2026.
Quand on se prépare à traduire, quand un texte n’a pas encore trouvé sa nouvelle forme, il y a un moment hors-langue qui ressemble à l’aurore.
Are we eating the Enlightenment?
Language, money, law — by such fictions is communal life sustained.
“The Vocative Case” & Other Poems. Kismet, 3 March 2025.
Home, the soft technology
of vowels in the mouth.
A letter for Deadlines and Divine Distractions, January 2025.
When you asked me for a letter I thought of one I had seen as a child, though only a couple of words have remained in my mind and everything else about it has disappeared, the writer and the recipient, the Syria from which it was sent, the fastidious copperplate and the sense of something delicate being weighed, as if the whole thing had been written with suede gloves.
A review of Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha. 4Columns, 8 November 2024.
Syntax is warped and wrecked by the pace of destruction.
Hair is the Arab archive
“Dialectics,” a poem. Academy of American Poets, 5 December 2023.
Promises are pooling
round our ankles, greener
they are pearling, born of needing
more to say.
There are other antiquities; there is a history of art where cubism comes before classicism.
The characters are not “rounded,” because neither are people; we exist to each other as a handful of shards.
Desire makes close readers of us all.
“A Homeland in the World,” an essay on the poetry of Safia Elhillo. The Nation, 26 September 2022.
Tragicomic timing of the second generation, doomed to flirt with ghosts.
Transcendence begins here and now; it smells of basil, of tripe.
Because not all testimony takes the form of speech, and not all speech is admissible as testimony. Because pain is not translatable. Because language falls short before atrocity. Because legality is not adequate to justice.
The deepest threat to power is not sedition but solidarity: the idea that a movement might be broadened, community chosen, that one group’s plight might be everyone’s concern.
An essay on the photographs of Tarrah Krajnak. Aperture, Winter 2021.
They capture the slippery thing “I” really is, more plural than the word identity implies: a tangle of mimicries, hauntings and experiments, gestures of fierce self-assertion snatched from a vista of stock images and half-digested histories.
This is poetry as apocalypse, in its first sense: the uncovering by verbal means of secret knowledge.
“Fibre Optics,” an essay on the woven art of Sheila Hicks. Apollo, September 2021.
Her larger works emulate the splendour of the natural world – its epic appetites, its sheer rude health. When I am at the beach a few days after our meeting, all the seaweed on the shore is plagiarising Hicks.
Here is a Syrian’s view of France, a description of Europe where Arabs circulate and thrive, a portrait of the Mediterranean as a zone of intense contact and interwoven histories.
“Slow Burn,” an essay on the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Harper’s, January 2021.
If I tell you I’m unbearable you can’t say I’m unbearable.
To survive, it may be better not to exist.
“Diaphanous, Diasporal We,” an essay on Bidoun magazine. Times Literary Supplement, October 2019.
Against orientalism it offered disorientation.
Translation is memory-work, a kind of vigil.
A review of “I am Ashurbanipal”, an exhibition at the British Museum. Apollo, February 2019.
Beauty and violence are laced together in queasy ways.
The state-led turn to antiquity was bound up with the young nation’s fantasies of Western modernity. As the minister of education Hasan Ali Yücel put it, “The roots of the civilisation we want to be a part of are in ancient Greek”.
“A World on its Way Out,” a letter from Göbekli Tepe. Apollo, July 2018.
Wildness is a post-agricultural concept, marking out that which has not been brought under human control.
She knows how to recognize a krokalia floor, and a Blüthner piano, and the scent of paulownia. One wants to be at her elbow, to see what she sees.
“After the Revolution,” an essay on dystopian fiction in Egypt. Harper’s, January 2018.
If politics get you down, lie back and think of Armageddon.
“Unseen Worlds,” a review of new books on Islam. Harper’s, May 2017.
If only Steve Bannon knew that one of the grand muftis spoke French with a Parisian accent, maybe we could all be friends!
“Social Smokers,” a review of Nicotine by Nell Zink. Literary Review, November 2016.
Asses and butts do a tremendous amount of metonymic work.
The literature on Muhammad’s ascension to heaven grew to be enormous, but only after it slipped its scriptural moorings and slid out into poetry and folklore. Every life of the Prophet had a chapter on the subject, and scholars and mystics endlessly pondered its meaning. The story was deployed and reinterpreted among Islam’s subcultures, and also among its foes: there are versions in Malay, Uzbek, and Old French, in Buginese and Castilian, and a beautifully illuminated version in Chaghatay, a form of Middle Turkish named after Genghis Khan’s second son.
“Everything in Flux,” a review of Falling Awake by Alice Oswald. Literary Review, July 2016.
Tithonus was loved by the dawn, who wanted to love him forever. She asked Zeus to grant him eternal life, which is not the same as eternal youth. The gods are literal-minded; the wish is granted; Tithonus withers and wastes.
The problem of how things began and of setting the story straight is one that Palestinians share.
As a figure of wistful obsolescence, Mevlut is in keeping with Pamuk’s interest in tradition, but as a poor man with an internal life he marks a bracing departure in the oeuvre.
Patients are photographed in domestic settings, their gowns parted to reveal long scars, their hands sometimes resting on an ornate table where enormous tumours stand jarred.
“Soft-Moving, Bright-Eyed Wild Thing,” an essay on Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, LRB blog, July 2015.
His papers and sketches reveal a restless prodigy, hungry for new images.
“In Thessaloniki,” an essay on the Costakis collection of avant-garde art. LRB blog, July 2014.
In a dacha outside Moscow he found a Constructivist masterpiece being used to close up a window; the owner wouldn’t part with it. He dashed to the city to fetch a piece of plywood the same size, ferried it back to the dacha, and swapped it for the painting.
“Q v. K,” an essay on Turkish alphabet politics. LRB blog, October 2013.
Dolmabahçe Palace was turned into a primary school where servants, ministers of state and other high officials learned the new script with the president of the republic as their teacher. He even composed an Alphabet March to help his pupils along.
I try not to give anyone the evil eye.