So What: New & Selected Poems With a Story 1971-2005

"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 music
fame nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life's brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long, and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on 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 the international poets featured at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival, and he will embark on a reading tour of the United States in the fall of 2006.

Taha Muhammad Ali is a leading poet in Palestinian. Born in 1931 in Galilee, he fled to Lebanon during the 1948 war. A year later he slipped across the border with his family and settled in Nazareth. The longtime owner of a souvenir shop, Ali is self-taught in contemporary literature and is a favorite reader at international literature festivals. Peter Cole has published two collections of poety and several translations from medieval and contemporary Hebrew. His Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (Princeton) received the MLA Translation Award.