The Good Arabs

Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems inThe Good Arabsground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker's communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen.

The Good Arabsgifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces. (FromMetonymy Press)

The Good Arabs is available in September 2021.

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Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a poetfrom Montreal. Their work has appeared inThe Best Canadian Poetry,The Puritanand The New Quarterly. They were longlisted for the 2019CBC Poetry PrizeforNancy Ajram Made Me Gay