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The Good Arabs

$9.99$17.95

Available in paperback (for customers living in Canada and in the US), PDF (worldwide), and EPUB (worldwide).

by Eli Tareq El-Bechelany Lynch

Fall 2021

Winner of Grand Prix du livre de Montréal
The Globe 100: The books we loved in 2021
Arab American Book Award, Honorable Mention
Khayrallah Prize, Honorable Mention
Blue Met New Contribution Award, Finalist

Oscillating between 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.

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a writer living in Tio’tià:ke. Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, carte blanche, the Shade Journal, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. They were longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2019. Their book knot body (2020), published by Metatron Press, was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize. The Good Arabs (2021), published by Metonymy Press, was the winner of the 2022 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and received an Honorable Mention from the 2022 Arab American Book Awards for the George Ellenbogen Poetry Award.

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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

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EPUB, PDF, Print

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Print books available for purchase to addresses in Canada and the United States. EPUBs and PDFs available worldwide.