Poet Mona Kareem launches her fiercely unapologetic new book of poetry at LUSH Liverpool.

A stateless Bidoon poet, Mona Kareem’s work is internationally acclaimed for its power and immediacy from her first publication at the age of 14. The collection comprises poetry spanning her career so far, presenting them together in English translation for the first time, side by side with the original Arabic.

“‘Mona Kareem skips and leaps across her poems with the patience of one who believes in the power of silences, of blank spaces, that can liberate perception from the hyperreflex of easy identification” – Fady Joudah

Winning fans around the world, her poems are surreal, bridging the gap between the self and what lies outside. They enact a boundless porosity between the body, nature, and the material world. Kareem plays with language to explore the infinite depths of human experience and identity. These poems, with dates, times and places obscured, present us with new maps of precarious, unstable, and permeable geopolitics. Kareem delineates ‘rupture’ as a facet of the migrant’s experience.

This will be a powerful event of bilingual readings in Arabic and English, and discussion of timely, ever-present and universal themes, celebrating the wonder of language and the possibilities of poetry to convey the most difficult experiences, as Kareem is joined in conversation with her editor, Nashwa Nasreldin.

Nashwa Nasreldin is a writer, editor, and a translator of Arabic literature. She is the translator of the collaborative novel, Shatila Stories, from Peirene Press, and Talib al-Rifae’s novel Shadow of the Sun, which is forthcoming from Banipal Books. She is a contributing editor of ArabLit.org and ArabLit Quarterly, and holds an MFA in Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

This event is a joint presentation with the Poetry Translation Centre.

Access: This venue is accessible. Please email admin@arabicartsfestival.co.uk for any access requests, including BSL.

Suitable for ages: 12+

Supported by LUSH.