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.
