O
Penguin Poets
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Narrated by:
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Zeina Hashem Beck
About this listen
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY LIT HUB AND THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
“O is so full of music and passion for life . . . Zeina Hashem Beck’s poems unfold the abundance of our world.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
From a “brilliant, absolutely essential voice” whose “poems feel like whole worlds” (Naomi Shihab Nye), a poetry collection considering the body physical, the body politic, and the body sacred
Zeina Hashem Beck writes at the intersection of the divine and the profane, where she crafts elegant, candid poems that simultaneously exude a boundless curiosity and a deep knowingness. Formally electrifying—from lyrics and triptychs to ghazals and Zeina's own duets, in which English and Arabic echo and contradict each other—O explores the limits of language, notions of home and exile, and stirring visions of motherhood, memory, and faith.
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Critic reviews
“Zeina Hashem Beck is graceful in [her] defiance. She embraces the multitudes–mother, citizen, poet, warrior–and presents herself to the reader as one whole.”—NPR
“Zeina Hashem Beck’s O was my favorite new book of poetry published this year. Together, the poems read like a dialogue between a single person and the divine: awe-inspiring, infuriating, and filled with unanswerable questions. The word that comes to mind to describe this collection, more than any other, is abundance: from odes to ghazals, Arabic to English, Beck calls upon a multitude of traditions to meet the challenge of navigating a life in language, and the result is something very beautiful to witness.”—Corinne Segal, Lit Hub
“Zeina Hashem Beck’s work is always layered and powerful, interrogating how we envision home, language and identity amid external forces that may be crushing in their impact . . . For a woman who has experienced conflict on a variety of personal and political levels, this quest for a language to describe her life, many lives, is profound, and in Beck’s talented hands, beautiful both sonically and in significance.”—Chicago Review of Books