“Rizkallah says all the things I feel as a fellow Lebanese American woman at this moment in America’s history. She won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize for the magic my body becomes. This collection contains one of my favorite poems: ‘if teta never had to leave lebanon I wonder if she would make preserves,’ where she writes: ‘they tell me to be less Poetry about my rage…sometimes there is only the bubble on the job applications / where you fill in a circle because you’re working hard you’re a good / American today / you get to be white as long as you’re behaving but you’re a liar…’ In her interview in 2017 in the LA Times Review of Books she said, ‘viewing your body however you choose is revolutionary.’ Her book is a testament to Arab American women being unapologetic about their stories.”
—Claudia Savage, Electric Lit
“In every list helping with despair, it helps to have an activist who can still find joy in the world. If you need to laugh through your tears, Syrian American Kahf is your woman. A professor, poet, and member of the Syrian Nonviolence Movement, Kahf’s strength is her ability to be outrageous, satirical, and lyric all at once. I’d recommend her book Hagar Poems because it has one of my favorite sequences and is a good introduction to Kahf’s humor, ‘Little Mosque Poems:’ ‘My little mosque offers courses on / the Basics of Islamic Cognitive Dissonance. / ‘There is no racism in Islam’ means / we won’t talk about it / ‘Islam is unity means / shuttup.’”
—Claudia Savage, Electric Lit