The Good Arabs

Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker's communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen.

The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.

ISBN: 1999058895
Format: Paperback
Pages: 120
Publisher: Metonymy Press
Published: September 21, 2021

"These poems are about the poet's multiplicity of identity, trans and Arab, from Beirut to Montreal." - The Globe and Mail, "The Globe 100: The books we loved in 2021""Everything about The Good Arabs is open-ended, curious, trying. El Bechelany-Lynch constructs a freeing poetic atmosphere, in which central concerns regarding spaces, family, tragedy, inheritance, and gender are swelling in the heat of each room." - Montreal Review of Books"The Good Arabs is a collection of both verse and prose poems that explores place and belonging. The poems take readers from post-explosion Beirut to Montreal in the summer and reflect on communities, identity and families both biological and chosen." - CBC Books, "45 Canadian poetry collections to watch for in fall 2021""Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch's exceptional The Good Arabs is an invitation to consider the 'cost' of living one's truth and what it might mean to remember what has always been known. Their work holds an intimacy as if we are overhearing a phone conversation or the author speaking on a balcony above us. 'Noises impossible in English' come through here, wrought in a mind attuned to tenderness and present conflicts. This is a bold and deeply necessary work. I am better for having read it." - Liz Howard, author of Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent"Eli Tareq El-Bechelany Lynch's The Good Arabs is a map of what it means to be queer, to be trans, to be Arab: from the hope of revolution to the Lebanese garbage crisis, of whiteness and its weight, of public space and private space and of eating pumpkin seeds on a summer balcony when the power is out. Even at its heaviest, this is a collection that insists on joy and on embodiment, reminding us that resistance can look like shaking one's hips to Nancy Ajram, too." - Zeyn Joukhadar, author of The Thirty Names of Night