Author: Eli Tareq El-Bechelany Lynch
ISBN: 1999058895 (print)
ISBN: 9781777485207 (EPUB)
ISBN: 9781998898121 (PDF)
Cover art by Lee Lai
Cover design by LOKI
- Paperback, 120 pages
- Printed in Quebec
- Publication date: September 21, 2021
“Original and fascinating in its design, this unclassifiable book written between poetry, narrative and conversations thinks our relationship to the world between private and political. The hybrid invents new spaces away from unique roots, between real and poetic space.”
—Carole David, Grand Prix du livre jury chair
”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”
“Reading El Bechelany-Lynch, you are reminded to come with tenderness to the work of ordinary things so that something larger and more lasting can begin.”
—Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst
“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.”
—Emily Mernin, Montreal Review of Books
“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
“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; winner of the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize
