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‘International Poetry Review: The Arab Spring’ Released
August 19, 2024 @ 8:00 am – 5:00 pm
Founded in 1975 by Evalyn Pierpoint Gill, International Poetry Review is dedicated to the idea that the world becomes a better place when we listen to the voices of writers working in a variety of languages. The journal publishes works written by global contemporary writers in their own languages accompanied by facing English translations.
INTERNATIONAL POETRY REVIEW 47.2024: THE ARAB SPRING
This issue centers on the role of poetry as a form of resistance in Middle Eastern and North African traditions. It opens with the Tunisian poet Abul Qassem Al-Shabbi’s “The Will of Life,” which became the official anthem of Tunisian protestors during the Tunisian Revolution. Two verses from this poem speak to this volume: “If one day people will live / then fate has no choice but to comply.” We feature canonical Mashreqi voices, such as Palestine’s Ibrahim Touqan, Syria’s Adonis, and Iraq’s Nazik Al-Mala’ika, along with emerging poets who write in Arabic. From the Maghreb, poets such as Ahmed Bounani, Hocine Tandjaoui, and Tahar Bekri expressed their revolutionary desires and reflections in French. Emerging artists are featured in the Arabic and French sections, but the reader will find that the English section also highlights and centers on the angst of the youth. The Editor has taken several creative liberties for inclusion and representation; artists may reside in the Arab world or the diaspora, but all the works are politically inclined regardless of the magnetizing pulls of their linguistic registers, geographic locales, or cultural influences. The number of artists across generations, languages, and resistance movements in the last two centuries reminds us that there is great beauty in times of tragedy.
