ABOUT THIS BOOK

In sparse, powerful lines, Shara Lessley recalls an expat's displacement, examines her experience as a mother, and offers intimate witness to the unfolding of the Arab Spring. Veering from the strip malls and situation rooms of Washington to the markets and mines of Amman, Lessley confronts the pressures and pleasures of other cultures, exploring our common humanity with all its aggressions, loves, biases, and contradictions.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Shara Lessley is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Diane Middlebrook Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The coeditor of The Poem's Country: Place and Poetic Practice, she lives in Oxford, England.

REVIEWS

"Lessley guides us along the knife-edge of a country on the edge of wars. An ex-pat Penelope wondering about her own Odysseus singed in ash, she keenly and empathically witnesses not only her own vulnerability as a young American mother in Amman but also courageous women around her—from Jordan's all-female demining team to an accused terrorist's wife." —Philip Metres

"These poems teach us that there is astonishment, not just fear, in each moment of displacement. I am hooked on Shara Lessley's music of adventure, intimacy of detail, the great sweeping largesse of address across continents, across ranges of emotion. Wherever you find yourself in this powerful collection, you will learn to see the world slightly differently." —Ilya Kaminsky

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

I
In Jordan’s Northernmost Province
First Days: August
Advice from the Predecessor’s Wife
Mine Warfare
The Explosive Expert’s Wife
In Arabic
Letter to Bruce in Paradise, Indiana
Arab Spring
Border
The Accused Terrorist’s Wife
Arab Spring:
Things Green

II
They Ask Me to Send
Petra by Night
The Explosive Expert’s Wife
The Marine Ball
Ex-pat Ghazal
The Ugly American
Dawn at the Dead Sea
Strawberries
The Explosive Expert’s Wife
Vertigo: Boston / The Middle East
Transfusion
Arabian Night
Scent of the Gods
These Days: April, Al-Shakareen St.

III
Aubade: Amman
The Long Flight Home
The Bath Massacre, 1927
The Explosive Expert’s Wife
Before the Bridal Shop
Domestic Intelligence
Long Division in a Time of Drought
Sleeper Cell
Found Poem: No Joke
The Clinic Bomber’s Mother
Letter to Rania in Amman
His Eye Is on the Sparrow
Plausible Deniability
Late Epithalamium with Perennials
Lines Following a Husband’s Departure

Notes