So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005 by Taha Muhammad Ali, Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin

"Taha Muhammad Ali speaks with an emotional forthrightness. . . . He has developed a style that seems both ancient and new, deceptively simple and movingly direct."--The Washington Post Taha Muhammad Ali is a revered Palestinian poet whose work is driven by vivid imagination, disarming humor, and unflinching honesty. As a boy he was exiled from his hometown, but rather than turning to a protest poetry of black-and-white slogans to convey this loss, he has created art of the highest order. His poems portray experiences that range from catastrophe to splendor, each preserving an essential human dignity. Neither musicfame nor wealth, not even poetry itself, could provide consolationfor life's brevity, or the fact that King Learis a mere eighty pages long, and comes to an end, and for the thought that one might suffer greatlyon account of a rebellious child. So What will include Arabic en face and introductions by co-translators Gabriel Levin and Peter Cole. Muhammad Ali will be one of t