the magic my body becomes

Poems by

Jess Rizkallah

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781610756198
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner, 2017 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize

In the magic my body becomes, Jess Rizkallah seeks a vernacular for the inescapable middle ground of being Arab American—a space that she finds, at times, to be too Arab for America and too American for her Lebanese elders.

These poems freely assert gender, sexuality, and religious beliefs while at the same time respecting a generational divide: the younger's privilege gained by the sacrifice of the older, the impossibility of separating what is wholly hers from what is hers secondhand.

In exploring family history, civil war, trauma, and Lebanon itself, Rizkallah draws from the spirits of canonical Arab and Middle Eastern poets. As a result of her conjuring, the reader feels these spirits begin to exorcise the grief of those who are still alive. Throughout, there is the body, a reclamation and pushback against cultures that simultaneously sexualize and shame women. And there is a softness as inherent as rage, a resisting of stereotypes that too often speak louder than the complexities of a resilient cultural identity.

The magic my body becomes is an exciting new book from an exciting young poet, a love letter to a people as well as a fist in the air.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Ghada says
• take a left here
• deir al qamar means convent of the moon and it’s all i think about
• Ghada says
• bop bop
• my assignment is to “draw chaos”
• Ghada says
• on practicing my arabic
• if teta never had to leave lebanon i wonder if she would make preserves
• white man says to my brown father
• I realized this at 23:
• aphorisms for lonely arabs
• you got way too excited about annihilation before the cosmic folk show
• Sin el Fil, Lebanon
• when they ask me who i pray to
• Ghada says
• poem as my dad
• the backroads
• she’ll make a husband so happy one day
• my other mouth
• fine then
• Ghada says
• tbh i’ve got more things to say about hair than i have hair
• sometimes i feel like my own life would never pass the bechdel test
• when daughters are not enough
• there goes the family
• Ghada says
• “i’ll bury you”
• Ghada says
• i am always carrying boxes
• dream log
• Ghada says
• something uglier than a flower
• my thighs could kill a man
• give me the flute and sing
• ahwak
• notepad fragments
• origin story
• Ghada says
• i am a garden of bones but don’t call me a cemetery
• Notes