These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit: Poems
Hayan Charara
(Author)
Description
Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award FinalistA thoughtful new collection of poems, one that deconstructs the deceptively simple question of what it means to be good-a good person, a good citizen, a good teacher, a good poet, a good father.
With These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, Hayan Charara presents readers with a medley of ambitious analyses, written in characteristically wry verse. He takes philosophers to task, jousts with academics, and scrutinizes hollow gestures of empathy, exposing the dangers of thinking ourselves "separate / from [our] thoughts and experiences." After all, "No work of love / will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart." But how do we act on fullness of heart? How, knowing as we do that "genocide is inscribed in our earliest and holiest texts"?
Thoughtful but never preachy, Charara sits beside us, granting us access to life's countless unglamorous dilemmas: crushing a spider when we promised we wouldn't, nearing madness from a newborn's weeping, resenting our lovers for what happened in a dream. "Good poems demand to be written from inside the poet," we are reminded. And that is where we find ourselves here: inside a lively and ethical mind, entertained by Charara's good company even as goodness challenges us to do more.
Product Details
Price
$16.00
$14.88
Publisher
Milkweed Editions
Publish Date
April 12, 2022
Pages
112
Dimensions
6.0 X 8.4 X 0.6 inches | 0.35 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781571315410
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About the Author
Hayan Charara is the author of These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit. He is a poet, children's book author, essayist, and editor. His other collections of poems include Something Sinister, The Sadness of Others, and The Alchemist's Diary. His children's book, The Three Lucys, received the New Voices Award Honor, and he edited Inclined to Speak, an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry. With Fady Joudah, he is also a series editor of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. His honors include a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucille Joy Prize in Poetry from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, the John Clare Prize, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston.
Reviews
Praise for These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit"Whether chronicling Arab American experiences of discrimination or relating uncomfortable episodes in a marriage, these poems favor an honesty that will elicit laughter if it doesn't make one cry . . . These surprising and transgressive poems confront the everyday contradictions of living with equal parts biting insight and grace."-Publishers Weekly
"Politics, philosophy, and what it means to live in America are all themes that are highlighted and pulled apart . . . Charara both turns away from traditions and keeps to them, making for many unexpected moments . . . A powerful and impactful collection."--Booklist"[Charara] is a multifaceted writer, equally comfortable in the long, languid line and the short poem, terse and biting. His fourth poetry collection, These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, shows off his range . . . Charara offers few answers but insists the questions themselves are worthwhile."--Shelf Awareness, Starred Review "Strange and dazzling . . . You can almost see the mind leaping from lilypad to lilypad, each transition both an outgrowth of the previous sentence and yet also deliciously surprising."--Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's"This entire collection dances between the direct and the subtle, at once using language that is both unflinching and delicate, both emphatic yet restrained. These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit is a complex and stunning collection that exemplifies Charara's incredible ability to write about life's complexities with grace and curiosity."--Marissa Ahmadkhani, The West Review"Charara's precise and imagistic poems will delight"-- David Starkey, California Review of Books
"In this collection, the process is not centered on the poet, but is made of a constant, lively, and sincere contact and combination with the larger community that is the world."--Lúuacute;cia Leão, RHINO Magazine
"Hayan Charara's These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit is both lushly transcendental and companionable, imbuing the cathedral on fire, the match that set the fire, and the spiders under the pews, with an equal measure of significance and holiness. Charara has developed a level of mastery--in life and in poetry--that allows him to shift from litany to epic to haiku sequence to elegy to hybrid prose, from the enigmatic to the declarative, the tragic to comic, from Lebanon to Detroit, with agility, clear in his judgments ('I'd much prefer spending an afternoon / with a bunch of jockeys or car mechanics than with philosophers') and steadfast in his global and personal rage and grief. 'Every seed a heart, every heart / a minefield, ' he writes. In this way, Charara's astonishing collection defies easy dualisms and locates the source of love and violence in these, those, this, and that--and in ourselves."--Diane Seuss"Reading Hayan Charara's These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, I kept thinking of a line from Gwendolyn Brooks: 'A man must bring / To music what his mother spanked him for / When he was two.' Charara's music is undeniable. His searching lyric, which has been a lodestar for me over the years, crescendos here at dazzling new heights. A man has a hotel liaison with an ex-w
"Politics, philosophy, and what it means to live in America are all themes that are highlighted and pulled apart . . . Charara both turns away from traditions and keeps to them, making for many unexpected moments . . . A powerful and impactful collection."--Booklist"[Charara] is a multifaceted writer, equally comfortable in the long, languid line and the short poem, terse and biting. His fourth poetry collection, These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, shows off his range . . . Charara offers few answers but insists the questions themselves are worthwhile."--Shelf Awareness, Starred Review "Strange and dazzling . . . You can almost see the mind leaping from lilypad to lilypad, each transition both an outgrowth of the previous sentence and yet also deliciously surprising."--Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's"This entire collection dances between the direct and the subtle, at once using language that is both unflinching and delicate, both emphatic yet restrained. These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit is a complex and stunning collection that exemplifies Charara's incredible ability to write about life's complexities with grace and curiosity."--Marissa Ahmadkhani, The West Review"Charara's precise and imagistic poems will delight"-- David Starkey, California Review of Books
"In this collection, the process is not centered on the poet, but is made of a constant, lively, and sincere contact and combination with the larger community that is the world."--Lúuacute;cia Leão, RHINO Magazine
"Hayan Charara's These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit is both lushly transcendental and companionable, imbuing the cathedral on fire, the match that set the fire, and the spiders under the pews, with an equal measure of significance and holiness. Charara has developed a level of mastery--in life and in poetry--that allows him to shift from litany to epic to haiku sequence to elegy to hybrid prose, from the enigmatic to the declarative, the tragic to comic, from Lebanon to Detroit, with agility, clear in his judgments ('I'd much prefer spending an afternoon / with a bunch of jockeys or car mechanics than with philosophers') and steadfast in his global and personal rage and grief. 'Every seed a heart, every heart / a minefield, ' he writes. In this way, Charara's astonishing collection defies easy dualisms and locates the source of love and violence in these, those, this, and that--and in ourselves."--Diane Seuss"Reading Hayan Charara's These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, I kept thinking of a line from Gwendolyn Brooks: 'A man must bring / To music what his mother spanked him for / When he was two.' Charara's music is undeniable. His searching lyric, which has been a lodestar for me over the years, crescendos here at dazzling new heights. A man has a hotel liaison with an ex-w
