Philip Metres stakes a claim for the cultural work that poems can perform—from providing refuge to embodying resistance, from recovering silenced voices to building a more just world, in communities of solitude and solidarity. Gathering a decade of his writing on poetry, he widens our sense of poetry as a way of being in the world, proposing that poems can offer a permeability to marginalized voices and a shelter from the imperial noise and despair that can silence us. The Sound of Listening ranges between expansive surveys of the poetry of 9/11, Arab American poetry, documentary poetry, landscape poetry, installation poetry, and peace poetry; personal explorations of poets such as Adrienne Rich, Khalil Gibran, Lev Rubinstein, and Arseny Tarkovsky; and intimate dialogues with Randa Jarrar, Fady Joudah, and Micah Cavaleri, that illuminate Metres’s practice of listening in his 2015 work, Sand Opera.

The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (Poets On Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Metres, Philip

History & Criticism

University of Michigan Press

Published every year in the spring, WLA Folios is a themed issue which complements and magnifies the annual journal while staking out new ground. For 2019, the focus of WLA Folios is the home. Twelve distinguished contributors were asked to consider the body and its many manifestations, voices, reflections, corruptions, memories, and aspirations.

2019 WLA Folios: Home

Parenting & Relationships

Sara Nović

Family Relationships

William Newmiller

“After reading Primer for Non-Native Speakers, I feel like I’ve just come back from a trip to Russia. Philip Metres’s brilliantly compressed lyrical narratives capture the grandeur and the bleakness of an almost mythological country, where a bronze statue of the great poet Pushkin now gazes out on the golden arches, and the swear of a slammed door is more expressive than a mouthful of words. These are subtle, accomplished, shimmering poems that explore the nuances of being an outsider in a language.”―Maura Stanton

Primer For Non-Native Speakers (Wick Chapbook Series 3)

Poetry

The Kent State University Press

Whether Thersites in Homer’s Iliad, Wilfred Owen in “Dulce et Decorum Est,” or Allen Ginsberg in “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” poets have long given solitary voice against the brutality of war. The hasty cancellation of the 2003 White House symposium “Poetry and the American Voice” in the face of protests by Sam Hamill and other invited guests against the coming “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq reminded us that poetry and poets still have the power to challenge the powerful.    Behind the Lines investigates American war resistance poetry from the Second World War through the Iraq wars. Rather than simply chronicling the genre, Philip Metres argues that this poetry gets to the heart of who is authorized to speak about war and how it can be represented. As such, he explores a largely neglected area of scholarship: the poet’s relationship to dissenting political movements and the nation.    In his elegant study, Metres examines the ways in which war resistance is registered not only in terms of its content but also at the level of the lyric. He proposes that protest poetry constitutes a subgenre that—by virtue of its preoccupation with politics, history, and trauma—probes the limits of American lyric poetry. Thus, war resistance poetry—and the role of what Shelley calls unacknowledged legislators—is a crucial, though largely unexamined, body of writing that stands at the center of dissident political movements.

Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Home Front since 1941 (Contemp North American Poetry)

University Of Iowa Press

Writing into the wounds and reverberations of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Philip Metres’ fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, is at once elegiac and activist, an exploratory surgery to extract the slivers of cartography through palimpsest and erasure. A wedding in Toura, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, uneasy interactions between Arab and Jewish neighbors in University Heights, the expulsion of Palestinians in Jaffa, another bombing in Gaza: Shrapnel Maps traces the hurt and tender places, where political noise turns into the voices of Palestinians and Israelis. Working with documentary flyers, vintage postcards, travelogues, cartographic language, and first person testimonies, Shrapnel Maps ranges from monologue sonnets to prose vignettes, polyphonics to blackouts, indices to simultaneities, as Palestinians and Israelis long for justice and peace, for understanding and survival.

Shrapnel Maps

Copper Canyon Press

Fugitive/Refuge

Poetry. "'Do our voyages,' Auden once asked, 'still promise the Juster Life?' Too many of us would answer this question in negative--not so Philip Metres. His poems seek above all to traverse borders, not merely those between nations and cultures but also--and most importantly--between the personal and the political. With a sure command of craft, which he displays in abundance, Metres plays for high stakes. TO SEE THE EARTH is a debut of unusual distinction"--David Wojahn.

To See the Earth

Cleveland State U Poetry Center

Sand Opera received Honorable Mention for the Arab American Book Award 2016, four years after its first section, "abu ghraib arias," in chapbook format, won the Arab American Book Award in 2012. "Sand Opera is what political poetry must be like today in our age of seemingly permanent war."--Mark Nowak Sand Opera emerges from the dizzying position of being named but unheard as an Arab American and out of the parallel sense of seeing Arabs named and silenced since 9/11. Polyvocal poems, arias, and redacted text speak for the unheard. Philip Metres exposes our common humanity while investigating the dehumanizing perils of war and its lasting effect on our culture. From "Hung Lyres": @ When the bombs fell, she could barely raisePreview her pendulous head, wept shrapnel until her mother capped the fire with her breast. She teetered on the highwire of herself. She lay down &amp; the armies retreated, never showing their backs. When she unlatched from the breast, the planes took off again. Stubborn stars refused to fall . . . Philip Metres has written a number of books, including Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera (2015), To See the Earth (Cleveland State, 2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront Since 1941 (University of Iowa, 2007). His work has appeared widely, including in Best American Poetry, and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, four Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Sand Opera

Alice James Books

"Philip Metres has created a miracle-a tender book so transporting it carries us deeply into the soul of Palestine as well as the love of a family-mysteries and blessings of language and haunted details-each tiny turn as huge as history and the next precious page of days." 
 
 --Naomi Shihab Nye 
 
 "A Concordance of Leaves is an epic poem of the indomitable yet fragile human spirit. Philip Metres brings Palestine and Palestinians into English with rare luminosity. One feels echoes of Oppen's succinct tenderness in the depiction of the numerous characters of this work. Without other, there is no self. And that other is the stranger who must be loved. Concordance is, after all, a wedding poem-leaves and pages in search of a certain passage toward harmony." 
 
 --Fady Joudah 
 
 Philip Metres has written a number of books, most recently the chapbook, abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine, 2011), winner of the 2012 Arab American Book Award, and To See the Earth (Cleveland State, 2008). His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of two NEA fellowships, a Watson Fellowship, four Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

A Concordance of Leaves

Diode Editions

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