What an incredibly powerful collection! I have never been one to read a book of poetry from cover to cover, but this book kept me engaged throughout each poem like a set of short stories. I was constantly in awe of how much Nye could include in so few words. I felt as if every single poem, practically every single line told a different story.
I think the most pivotal aspect of the poetry was its metacognitive nature: she writes about writing and the power that comes with language. The way she talks about language and communication is incredibly powerful and really made me think about the importance of being able to communicate in one’s native language. This book combines elements of immigration, family, loss, war, peace and the struggle of being torn between two worlds: being an adult vs. being a child, being an American vs. being Arab, speaking English vs. speaking Arabic, living in war vs. living in peace and on and on. She talks about language as a way to express the pain and suffering of living between these two worlds. “The bombs break everyone’s/sentences in half,” she writes, emphasizing the power and violence of cultural destruction (61).
One of the other elements of Nye’s writing that I so enjoyed was her use of personification to emphasize the effect violence has on not only people, but places, things, and relationships. In the poem, “For the 500th Dead Palestinian, Ibtisam Bozieh” she writes about a girl who was killed at an extremely young age: “Dead at 13, for staring through/the window into a gun barrel/which did not know you wanted to be/a doctor” (53). She is treating violence as its own separate entity, a powerful being that can have feelings and emotions, but just chooses not to emit them. In another poem she talks about books and personifies them, but this time gives them emotions: “in Iraq a book never had one owner—it had ten./lucky books, to be held often/and gently, by so many hands/later in American libraries she felt sad/for books no one ever checked out” (110). This is another time in which she emphasizes the power of language and the importance of gaining and sharing knowledge. Following war, she says “certain words, feel impossible in the mouth./Casualty: too casual, it must be changed.” (35)
I really appreciated her focus on children and schools because I feel as though so many adults have written about the Middle East and their experiences, but their writing is not tangible for younger audiences. Nye writes about the experiences in such a way that they become so much more accessible for younger people. She talks about things like school, family and friends with which younger people are more familiar than say, Israeli-Palestinian conflict or strategies of war. For example in one poem she says, “I mighta have been dead too,/for something simple like staring/or shouting what was true/and getting kicked out of school” (53). She really made me think about how much I take my own schooling for granted. I can—and am encouraged!—to say what I think and believe in my classes and I feel safe in my school. Whereas in Nye’s world, “when students gather quietly/inside their own classroom/to celebrate the last day of school,/the door to the building/gets blasted off” (60).
Overall, I felt Nye’s collection was extremely well-written and eye-opening. I don’t know if I would say “enjoyable,” because so many of the poems were so sad, but they were important and that is why I liked this book. In post 9/11 society I think these poems would be a great way to start discussions about the relationship between the U.S. and the Middle East as well as the experience of immigrants in the U.S. Read these poems, but savor them individually, not all at once. Happy reading!
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