Drawn from a decade of writing and conversations by Arab American poet and writer Philip Metres, Dispatches from the Land of Erasure redefines the writer’s role as a catalyst for justice and a resister of empire. Gathering together a wide range of writing and writers, particularly from Arab and Black diaspora, Dispatches reports on what white imperial culture attempts to erase, while uplifting the voices and people who resist that erasure, offering a vision of a more just and peaceful world.

With keen insight into the lived experience of Arab Americans and other historically marginalized communities, the book explores the struggle for a just peace through reading Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jewish writers of conscience who contend with the wall of silence around the issue of Palestine. Further, Dispatches illuminates how to write a poetry of peace and justice, and how poetic activism and activist poets situate themselves in communities seeking change. Divided into four sections—Erasing the Erasures: Writing While Arab, The Poetics of Palestine, The Poetics of Justice, and The Poetics of Peacebuilding—Dispatches weaves personal essays, cultural criticism, group chats, interviews, literary analysis, reviews, and roundtables that include luminaries like Mosab Abu Toha, Hayan Charara, Sahar Khalifeh, Marwa Helal, Erika Meitner, Naomi Shihab Nye, Craig Santos Perez, and M. NourbeSe Philip. Together, the book models the crucial need for robust dialogue to overcome the echo chamber that limits the growth and reach of social movements and to dream of a future beyond the land of erasure.

Philip Metres is Professor of English and Director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. His twelve books include collections of poetry, translations from the Russian, literary scholarship, and a previous book in the Poets on Poetry series, The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018). Metres has received many awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship and the William Carlos Williams Award.

Acknowledgments
Permissions
Introduction: Dispatch on Omelas
I. Erasing the Erasures: Writing While Arab
1. Same As It Ever Was: On Edward Said, Orientalism, and the Depiction of Arabs in America
2. Dispatches from the Land of Erasure (with Marwa Helal and Farid Matuk)
3. Imagining Iraq: On the Fifteenth Anniversary of the Iraq War                                    
II. On Palestine
4. The Wall of Silence
5. Beyond the Familiar Landscape of Violence: A Conversation with Philip Metres about Shrapnel Maps by Milena Williamson    
6. Vexing Resistance, Complicating Occupation: A Contrapuntal Reading of Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns and David Grossman’s The Smile of the Lamb
7. “Nothing Will Stop Me From Writing What I See”: An Interview with Sahar Khalifeh
8. Teaching (Beyond) the Conflict: A Contrapuntal Reading of Savyon Liebrecht’s “A Room on the Roof” and Ghareeb Asqalani’s “Hunger”
9. Fidelity to the Unnameable: Zaina Alsous’s A Theory of Birds
10. Of Seeing, Unseen, and Unseeable: Technology, Poetry, and “When It Rains in Gaza”
11. “To Be the Poet of Troy”: An Interview with Mosab Abu Toha
12. Dispatches from the Land of Erasure During a Genocide
III. The Poetics of Justice
13. Poetics/Documents/Justice: A Conversation (with Susan Briante, Philip Metres, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Craig Santos Perez)
14. “A Story That Can’t Be Told, Yet Must Be Told”: Interview with M. NourbeSe Philip
15. Black Lives Matter and the Poetics of Racial Justice
16. Revolution in the First Person Plural: Mark Nowak’s Social Poetics
IV. The Poetics of Peacebuilding
17. I Never Saw Him Drowning: Great-Uncle Charlie, the Great War, and the Peace Show
18. Poetry, Precarity, and Israel/Palestine: A Pandemic Lockdown Dialogue (with Mosab Abu Toha, Conor Bracken, Erika Meitner, Rachel Neve-Midbar, and Naomi Shihab Nye)
19. Never/Enough: An Afterword to Paideuma’s Symposium on War and Literature
Notes