Fugitive/Refuge
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- USD 10.99
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- USD 10.99
Descripción editorial
Dynamically pairing traditional and experimental forms, Philip Metres traces ancient and modern migrations in an investigation of the ever-shifting idea of home.
In Fugitive/Refuge, Philip Metres follows the journey of his refugee ancestors—from Lebanon to Mexico to the United States—in a vivid exploration of what it means to long for home. A book-length qasida, the collection draws on both ancient traditions and innovative forms—odes and arabics, sonnets and cut-ups, prayers and documentary voicings, heroic couplets and homophonic translations—in order to confront the perils of our age: forced migration, climate change, and toxic nationalism.
Fugitive/Refuge pronounces the urge both to remember the past and to forge new poetic forms and ways of being in language. In one section, Metres meditates on the Arabic greeting—ahlan wa sahlan—and asks how older forms of welcome might offer generous and embodied ways of responding to the challenges of mass migration and digital alienation in postmodern societies. In another, he dialogues with Dante to inform new ways of understanding ancestral and modern migrations and the injustices that have burdened them. Ultimately, Metres uses movement to create a new place—one to home and dream in—for all those who seek shelter.
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The powerful sixth book from Metres (Shrapnel Maps), who is of Lebanese descent, confronts the trials of the present moment—including forced migration, climate change, and nationalism—through his family's migration story. Metres wields poetic forms (among them odes, sonnets, and prayers) to explore themes of loss and resilience. The volume is arranged around the qasida, an ancient Arabic poetic form consisting of three sections: naṣīb (fate), raḥīl (exile), and fakhr (honor or praise). With lyrical mastery, Metres riffs on the famous sonnet by Emma Lazarus found on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." His tonal equivalent contrasts the original with the cry of a "migrant woman" who scrounges for anything that "might fill her children's insides": "We've hidden in swarms/ To escape the dread masters of horror...Welcome us, the deplored./ We stand at the landing of your golden dorm" ("The New New Colossus"). Metres reflects on those "who live their last years/ where they've always lived—/ in another country" in poems that transcend time and place, language and silence, honoring the enduring spirit of those who journey in search of refuge.
