At my college, one creative writing professor challenged students to write happy love poems, an assignment everyone griped about. Unlucky-at-love-and-dating tales, on the other hand, are part of the fabric of modern U. The growth of online dating over the past few decades has only heightened both the comic and tragic potential of dating stories β or so I hear.
How would I have any idea? The result is a sort of rom-com in verse β though without a traditional happy ending β and the type of story an American woman of Arab heritage, such as Halaby, never or rarely gets to star in on page or screen. At the start of the collection, when her husband leaves, Halaby is uprooted, like the twisted acacia tree in her front yard. In the title poem, she writes:. Halaby encounters nice guys, racists, rich guys, and cheaters, and she begins to understand herself a little more.
This, perhaps, is the central question of the book. What does it mean to want love, to want to be loved?
Of one lover, she writes:. I place my hand over yours close my eyes and squeeze until the longing recedes just a bit. Even though I feel like the hyphen is also where I live. In this collection, Halaby puts her Arabness on the page, but without the expected trappings of metaphorical language, food imagery, or very much transliterated Arabic.
Arab is simply who she is. Why an Author Writes to a Guy Holding a Fish ends with an epilogue written in spring , one more tale of dating gone wrong. He ends up ghosting her. Of course. His silence becomes the impetus for her to move on and push forward. I delete my profile submit why an author writes to a guy holding a fish change jobs visit Houri and write. Thanks to the poet for writing and to the reviewer for reviewing.
