Wanting in Arabic: Second Edition

by Trish Salah

Overview

Wanting in Arabic is a refusal of convenient silences,
convenient stories. The author dwells on the contradictions of a transsexual poetics, in its attendant disfigurations of lyric, ghazal, l'ecriture feminine, and, in particular,
her own sexed voice. Without a memory of her father's language, the questions her poems ask are those for a home known through photographs, for a language lost with childhood.
Braiding theoretical concerns with the ambivalences of sexed and raced identity, with profound romanticism,
Wanting in Arabic attempts to traverse the fantasies of foundational loss and aggressive nostalgia in order to further a poetics of a conscious partiality of being, of generous struggle and comic rather than tragic misrecognition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781927494301
Publisher:	T S A R Publications
Publication date:	11/10/2013
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Trish Salah's recent writing appears in the journals Eleven Eleven, Feminist Studies, Journal of Medical Humanities, No More Potlucks, and in the anthologies, Selling Sex, Féminismes électriques, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Her research investigates the emergence of Transgender Minor/ity Literatures. Her first book, Wanting in Arabic, was published by TSAR in 2002 and launched in a new edition in 2013. She is co-editor of a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, focused on Trans* Cultural Production, out in 2014, as is her new book, Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. She is currently assistant professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg.
Transgressing Femme Identity, and Bent on Writing.

Table of Contents

Introduction Lisa Robertson: Trish Salah and the Andalusian University v

Wanting in Arabic

Phoenicia ≠ Lebanon 3

Wanting in Arabic 7

Ghazals in Fugue 13

What Daphne wrote Georgia 19

After Mahmoud Darwish's Beyond Identification 21

Reading The Book of Suicides 23

Language Becoming a Girl

when there are three 28

in this reel July is humid 35

where skin breaks 37

Fawn gets Orchid, or, either Fawn gets Orchid or i do 40

wish fraud 44

notes toward dropping out 47

Hysteria of Origins

Pandora's Machine 52

Tiresias' Confession (…in the snow) 54

Aloysius, stenographer 56

Eurydice's face turning 57

Orpheus, the Muses' return 59

Sappho avers 62

Enduring This Future

Psychic Fair 68

Fata Morgana (Ferial Mirage) 70

Surgical Diary 73

red like a femme 80

June 15 83

Ballard's Angel 88

Land Day (March 30, 1976) 89

Furious 90

Ghazals for Sharon Cohen (Dana International) 94

Draughts of Purim 96

Afterword 99

Acknowledgments 101

Editorial Reviews

Praise for the first edition:

"Trish Salah's poetic sequence is not simply a narrative of gender change;
it's a wandering, thoughtful text, one both fierce and tremulous."
- Erin Mouré

"...Salah's writing bosoms up every damn dam in the literary waterway."
- The Globe and Mail

From the Publisher