Nazar Boy - poems

From one of the most imaginative and radical voices in contemporary poetry, a debut collection of fierce tenderness, political acuity, and powerful lyricism.

Tarik Dobbs’s work explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs is achingly familiar with the power dynamics, violence, and capitalistic undercurrents woven through the language of the colonizer. They challenge this power in visual, free-verse, and formally intense poems—both traditional and innovative—that stretch the elasticity of borders, verbs, images, redactions, and more. Ranging from sonnets to concrete poems, Nazar Boy is visually stimulating, thought-provoking, emotionally wrenching, and exquisitely crafted.

Dobbs’ poems blur and collapse narrative distances within and between places, from the Levant to Michigan, and break down dichotomies portrayed in Western media: between Arabness and whiteness, intellectualism and the working poor, Muslimness and queerness, disability and desire. By turns irreverent and serenely gentle, Dobbs calls us to speak, to dream, and to imagine beyond those distances so that we might speak, dream, and imagine better versions of ourselves, our relationships to each other, and our places in the world.

List of contents

LIVED HERE

POEM WHERE EVERY BIRD IS A DRONE

DUPLEX: MY BROTHER WAS BORN BOTH ALLY & COMBATANT

THE WIRE

PERSONA POEM AS AMERICA

NAMESAKE WITH NO HISTORY FOUND

THE POET CONSIDERS THEIR ROLE

DRAGPHRASIS: ALEXIS MATEO CALLS HOME THE TROOPS WITH A DEATH DROP

DEAR PRE-QUEER LOVER,

REFLECTION IN STAINLESS STEEL MIRROR DIORAMA WITH ACCORDION FOLD

RONDEAU: IN 1990 ONE SUNSET EQUALIZES THE LIGHT BETWEEN A CHECKPOINT

CONTROL ROOM AND A DARKENED HALL TO REVEAL THE SILHOUETTE OF AN ISRAELI

SOLDIER

HOME ON THE RANGE, GAZA STRIP

DECONSTRUCTING MY BIRTH

WHEN MY MOM RENTED A HOUSE ACROSS THE STREET FROM A DOLLAR GENERAL

X-RAY DIPTYCH IN BEN GURION AIRPORT

SKY BRIDGE RENDERING ABOVE MINNEAPOLIS & THE WEST BANK

SON THROWING STONES IN THE STREET

ANTI-DRONE NIQAB MADE FROM SILVER

MAD HONEY

MY UNCLE WHO DIED OF AIDS PROBABLY

EVERY MORNING I TAKE A BUS THROUGH THE WEST BANK, MINNEAPOLIS

FLY INFESTED HOUSEPLANT

BRACELET OF SILENCE

PERSONA POEM AS IN-HOME DRONE

NUB

A DJINN HUMS IN SAKHNIN

PARADE IN GAZA: THE MODEL IS ABOUT TO BE BURNED

LANDAYS: ON EID AL-ADHA, MEN ON TV TIE A LENGTH OF MANILLA ROPE

EVERYTHING MY FATHER TOUCHES

THE FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD CONSIDERS HIS CLOSET

FINALLY WRITING THE POEM

NUB (ORIGIN STORY)

A SYNDROME RECEIVES HIS LIFETIME SERVICE AWARD

ON IRAQ WAR VETERANS

PORTRAIT WITH UNKNOWN DIMENSIONS

THAT JULY, MY SITO CALLS FROM DAMASCUS AT MIDNIGHT

NOT AN EXIT

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the author

Tarik Dobbs (b.1997; Dearborn, MI) is a writer, an artist, and a Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Tarik's poems appear in the Best New Poets and Best of the Net anthologies, as well as AGNI, Guernica, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Tarik helps run poetry.onl, and served as a guest editor at Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America as well as Zoeglossia: A Community for Poets with Disabilities. Tarik received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Minnesota, and is currently an M.F.A. fellow in art, theory, practice at Northwestern University.

Summary

From one of the most imaginative and radical voices in contemporary poetry, a debut collection of fierce tenderness, political acuity, and powerful lyricism.

Tarik Dobbs’s work explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs is achingly familiar with the power dynamics, violence, and capitalistic undercurrents woven through the language of the colonizer. They challenge this power in visual, free-verse, and formally intense poems—both traditional and innovative—that stretch the elasticity of borders, verbs, images, redactions, and more. Ranging from sonnets to concrete poems, Nazar Boy is visually stimulating, thought-provoking, emotionally wrenching, and exquisitely crafted.

Dobbs’ poems blur and collapse narrative distances within and between places, from the Levant to Michigan, and break down dichotomies portrayed in Western media: between Arabness and whiteness, intellectualism and the working poor, Muslimness and queerness, disability and desire. By turns irreverent and serenely gentle, Dobbs calls us to speak, to dream, and to imagine beyond those distances so that we might speak, dream, and imagine better versions of ourselves, our relationships to each other, and our places in the world.

Foreword

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Product details

• Authors: Tarik Dobbs, Tarik Dobs
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 11.06.2024
• EAN: 9798888900895
• ISBN: 979-8-88890-089-5
• No. of pages: 100
• Illustrations: b&w images
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History; Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / Middle Eastern, POETRY / Middle Eastern, Middle East, Politics and government, Warfare and defence, Relating to LGBTQ+ people, POETRY / LGBTQ+, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / War, Relating to LGBTQIA+ people