Laila Halaby

The Publisher Says: The Weight of Ghosts is a circling of grief following the death of the author’s older son when he was 21, a horror that was compounded by her younger son’s drug use, the country’s slow eruption as it dealt with its own brokenness, and reckoning the author had to do regarding her own story. Weight is a lyrical reclaiming and an insistence by the author that she own the rights to her story, which is American flavored with an unreleasing elsewhere. Weight is an immigrant story and a love story. While it is raw and honest and tragic, it is also a hopeful, funny, and original telling that demonstrates the strength of the human spirit, while offering a vocabulary for these most unmanageable human experiences.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I need to listen to myself. I don't like poetry, the feeling I always have of being talked at by the poet not to by the writer; and this is, make no mistake, poetry with prose's line breaks added. I relate to the lady's grief at the loss of her child and the many issues surrounding being Other in the increasingly hostile US. If you like poetry, give it a whirl, but for me it felt like many more than its two-hundred-ish pages of being told I'm defective for not "getting" the ever-so-pretty (I suppose) phrases.… (plus d'informations)

I enjoyed this poetry collection quite a bit. I was expecting more political pieces, which I don't usually seek out, but there were not as many as I anticipated, and the ones included were well written and not what I had expected.

While I couldn't relate to every one of Halaby's poems, there were quite a few that I connected with. Even though I have never dealt with the same cross-culture & mixed-race issues that were addressed in several of the poems, I have dealt with similar emotions among my own peer groups. Classic high school drama, now that I can look back on it, but I recognized many of the same emotions I felt about that time in my life while reading these poems.

My favorite poem in this collection is the second poem of "The Journey"; the following lines make me feel like Laila Halaby is writing what is in my head:

"...demanded validation / as a woman / as an Arab / as a writer / and then / when no one wanted my stories / and no one cared where I was born / where my father was from / why I looked the way I did / ...I had become exactly who I always wanted to be: a normal person whose labels were irrelevant"

"Motherhood" is another favorite, and I found myself returning to the first poem of Halaby's reflection on Khaled Mattawa's reading numerous times as well.


*received a digital copy free through netGalley… (plus d'informations)

Arab girls in America.

This is an interesting look at the feelings and emotions of four Jordanian female cousins with Palestinian roots. They all live an expatriated life, in Jordan or USA and relate in different ways to their Arab heritage.

I initially found the book rather confusing and I wished I'd kept a who's who from the start. It felt like a cast of thousands and I had a job remembering how each of the cousins was connected. The chronology was also non-linear, which caused more confusion.
However, it was the beautiful use of words that redeemed this book for me.

"The sky is light blue and the water where it meets is dark blue. "Can we swim out there to where the two blues meet?" (P124)

"Television in our house is like a loud monkey: it never shuts up when it's awake , and it always holds everyone's attention no matter how silly its behaviour" (P18)

And I loved Walid's response when a bartender asked if he could call him Willy; "I learned your language, you can learn my name."

Laila Halaby has a Jordanian father and an American mother and writes from the heart with this collection of stories that reveal the complexity of trying to operate in two diverse cultures at the same time. It's not so much a narrative as a diary and seems to be lacking a definitive ending, but it certainly is an eye-opener it terms of a behind the scenes understanding of the complex Arab situation.… (plus d'informations)

Halaby draws on her experiences as an Arab American to explore the duality of her experience and her general sense of homelessness. The poems read like passages from a memoir, illustrating her relation to two cultures, neither of which seem to fit properly. Her personal life mixes with her reactions to world events, such as the Iraq war or the bombing of Palestine.

You can tell that Halaby was a fiction writer first, because her poems tend toward narrative. However, this is not simply prose broken up into lines. The lines of her poetry goes from long lines to short, choppy lines, which emphasis words and phrases to effectively evoke the imagery, metaphor, and disjointed emotions presented. On the whole this is a beautiful and intellectual book of poetry.… (plus d'informations)