The Raven, The Bayou, & The Willow - by Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman Paperback

About the Book

Through images drowned in memories and narrative, these poems explore being Arab, American, Muslim, family, and trauma. This collection does not hold answers, but questions, longing, defeat, and hope.

Book Synopsis

This collection takes you from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico. How do we keep faith with the divine when it is not tangible? The collection encompasses the history, nature, mythology, and identities of these spaces and how to find childhood living on the bayou. A mixed girl struggling with culture, religion, identity, and the growing hostility of alt-right conservatism. Through images drowned in memories and narrative, these sections explore being Arab, being American, Muslim, generational trauma, mixed parenthood, fairy tales, music, family, patriarchy, the failed american dream, and the pandemic. They ask us to re-examine what it means to be an American, how do we grapple with capitalism and imperialism? Especially when you are split, both a child of the colonized and the colonizer. How do we move forward when grief fills your throat and leaves the words dry on your tongue? How does trauma cling to the body and the mind? How does the world see these traumas when they grip each word off your tongue? How does nature heal all wounds when the ground rots beneath our feet? This collection does not hold answers, but questions, longing, defeat, and hope. It asks, how do we go on?

Review Quotes

From the first poem in her extraordinary collection, Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman creates a dazzling world of overlapping myth and danger, a world where a woman emerges like Venus from sea foam, where father's black skin "makes the neighbors uncomfortable" and "mama limits our Islam to praying at home," where the Wahhabis patrol the shoreline and "Peter O'toole / covered in coppertone" slips into narratives full of pirates, lutes, schooners, and the Texas revolution. Here, Orpheus, Luther Van Ross, Quetzalcoatl, and the Chipotle franchise all co-exist, not in forced harmony, but in vibrant, provocative, sound-spangling tension. Al-Qaisi-Coleman weaves worlds and melodies together, invoking Odysseus while indicting Imperialism. Both disarmingly timeless and unmistakably 21st century, The Raven, the Bayou, & the Willow soars in its expansive articulation of what it means to be an American with indelible ancestry-forever displaced, forever home; colonized and colonizer; "both woman holding the camera / and woman being opened by it"-during an empire's collapse. "What is this house?" Al-Qaisi-Coleman asks in her opening poem, "Neo-Americana;" The Raven, the Bayou, & the Willow holds the answer.

-Cait Weiss Orcutt, Author of Valley Speak

Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman's The Raven, The Bayou, & The Willow navigates alternating landscapes that ask us: where do we hold our grief? On the tongue? In the blood? In the bayou? In the desert? Every answer is an image--be it through myth or through memory, our speaker summons the familial, literary, and liturgical ancestors in which she had once placed her faith. She writes, "salvation/ is so far from god/ and so close to the united states" and readers are left interrogating our own relationships to an imperial ever-after. She takes us on a cartographic journey of an ephemeral home where every fruit, flower and figure is both lush and starved; this balancing act permeates every poem, shedding light on a life "that begged / to be lived even now / after the end."

-Aris Kian Brown, Poet & Activist, Author of Blacademic

Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman makes brilliant use of divinity. In this collection, she wields it brilliantly to capture tragedy, celebration, despair, hope, and home. Often, it is captured all within a single pen stroke. Is oxygen necessary? Probably, but not as necessary as this book.

-Omer Ahmed, Poet & Activist

In an intricate fabric that weaves stories of loss and violence with the bright threads of ancestral beauty and a rich cultural and familial history of a Bedouin, multiethnic Iraqi family, Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman's poems embrace the longing for human connection and creates of a personal mythology based on the power of an immigrant family's story. Fierce and protective, Al-Qaisi- Coleman's book confronts the legacies of violence and intergenerational trauma within this family and casts against these realities a narrative that reclaims power through stories of grief, loss, joy, and love, and a searching gaze. "Can you see how the river shimmers?," she writes, in "Texas Pledge." "I pledge allegiance to / the farm to market roads / Connecting rivaling towns / ... [how] the Brazos and Colorado rivers / Meet in midland Texas / Collapsing before the hills that give way to mountains." Exploring complicated terrain of imperialism and the family's story of survival in the United States, Al-Qaisi-Coleman pledges allegiance to the beauty of their resilience and the importance of telling their stories: "I remembered when Baba told me stories of ships / He boarded long boats with oars / The size of carriages / How the sea looked never-ending-/ I am here / I am here / I