How Long Have You Been With Us?

“As a writer starting out in the early 1990s,” Khaled Mattawa begins“Meet the Poet-Stranger,” the essay that opens this collection, “I wantedthe company of fellow immigrants who worked in the language of theiradopted homelands, chiseling away at their exile and making a home forthemselves in poetry.” Throughout his career, Mattawa’s thoughtful andpolitically astute considerations of what it means to create as a “poetstranger,”particularly for those of Middle Eastern heritage, have beensteeped in his personal experience as a Libyan-American writer.

The essays included in this volume cover Mattawa’s approach towardtranslating contemporary and classical Arabic poetry, the personal andinternational politics of poetry, and the difficulty of representing one’sown family history in one’s own writing. The concluding piece, “Poemsand Days (A Reader’s Memoir),” presents his deep engagement with thework of other poets during his formative years as a writer.