نبذة عن الكتاب

The Palestinian poet Shatha Abu Hnaish’s A Love that Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito is a book of unflinching love poems, often dramatic in image or self-perception. A daring woman’s voice alerts us these brief poems may not be as straightforward as they appear: “I am a woman, lovely as a rose / This is not as easy as you think / this obliges you to meld with the reflection / in my mirror.” Her “you” may be simultaneously a lover/husband, the reader,poetry itself, or the personified “evils” to whom the book is dedicated. Francesca Bell’s and Noor Nader Al A’bed’s vivid translation shows Shatha Abu Hnaish to be a generous guide to the Arabic trope of the heart, the love-involved psyche in itsofferings where pain, longing, and sometimes anger, intertwine. As she writes to us, her readers, “My heart is a scarf / It flew / onto your heart’s branch.”