E-mails from Scheherazad (Contemporary Poetry Series)
Kahf is an earthy, playful, and purposeful poet who writes with as much sass as sensitivity about what it's like to be a woman, a person of color, an immigrant, and a headscarf-wearing Muslim in a non-Muslim country. Born in Damascus, Kahf came to the U.S. as a child, and her empathy is incandescent for all who have had to leave their homes to save their lives and those of their families, and for those whose homes have been destroyed, expressing particular commiseration with besieged Iraqis. Whimsical, colloquial, and disarmingly witty, Kahf conjures a reincarnated Scheherazad "living in Hackensack" and newly divorced so that she's free to pursue her writing. "Words are to die for," after all. Kahf astutely considers the myriad conundrums and frustrations of women's lives in general and Muslim women in particular, and she is brilliantly wry and utterly irresistible in such showstoppers as her poem about a walkout staged by all the chilly and hungry female nudes and odalisques in a Matisse retrospective.Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.