Swimming to Syria

Al-Bara winds into groves, where winter branches hang heavy with rain, and olive trees are mud sunk red like my boots after I squish through a frame of branches opening to a stone tower. Other tombs open skyward, their triangle tops gone as if pushed right off the peaked lid where spirits float up, and the living muck into another day.

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Swimming to Syria

Published on Nov 16, 2021

Penumbra Press

Swimming to Syria is a collection of poems that reflect on the author’s experiences while teaching at the University of Aleppo, guest lecturing at the Universities of Latakia and Homs, and exploring the country on her own as well as with colleagues, friends, acquaintances, and even students; it also includes more recent poems that wrestle with events there and in the United States since her return. Though personal, the poems form a record of actual events, conflicts, and tensions, some of which have since become intransigent. The poems evoke the slipperiness of time, of the past and the present, of observations and of memory. They are elegiac without using the meter of elegy; tone draws from the landscape, which changes even when nothing “happens.” This collection includes poems that focus on ordinary events as well as ancient history and recent history to try to understand what has been seen and felt.