3Arabi Song

This one is a beautiful, lyrical--truly, as it captures many singers and songs!--chapbook that won the 2016  Rattle Chapbook Prize: 3Arabi Song by Zeina Hashem Beck, a Lebanese poet. Its lyric poems include ghazals and pantoums in many voices; we hear the favorite singers and songs of her generation, and more. There is lament, there is gratitude, there is joy, and more lament.

God--
is sometimes a camera,
sometimes has a nom de guerre...

I learned that 3Arabi is the Arabizi way of writing "Arabic." Arabizi = Arabic + Englizi, and this is a whole language rendition out there in the world, especially the online world, that I knew nothing about before and am grateful to discover.

I am also grateful to discover this book in August, where, in the poem "Listen," I read "Viscous, this August heat..." and, right now, it is!