How Long Have You Been With Us?

""As a writer starting out in the early 1990s," Khaled Mattawa begins "Meet the Poet-Stranger," the essay that opens this collection, "I wanted the company of fellow immigrants who worked in the language of their adopted homelands, chiseling away at their exile and making a home for themselves in poetry." Throughout his career, Mattawa's thoughtful and politically astute considerations of what it means to create as a "poet-stranger," particularly for those of Middle Eastern heritage, have been steeped in his personal experience as a Libyan-American writer. The essays included in this volume cover Mattawa's approach toward translating contemporary and classical Arabic poetry, the personal and international politics of poetry, and the difficulty of representing one's own family history in one's own writing. The concluding piece, "Poems and Days (A Reader's Memoir)," presents his deep engagement with the work of other poets during his formative years as a writer"--