Nostalgia, My Enemy: Poems by Saadi Youssef and translated by Sinan Antoon, Peter Money

This is poetry from Iraq.

Nostalgia, My Enemy: Poems by Saadi Youssef translated by Sinan Antoon, Peter Money is published by Graywolf Press. This is a Book originally written in Arabic. This was published in 2012.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781555976293E12.

Nostalgia, My Enemy: Poems, by Saadi Youssef and translated by Sinan Antoon, Peter Money from Arabic, brings Arabic-language poetry from Iraq into English through Saadi Youssef’s exile lyric, political memory, and nostalgia treated not as comfort but as adversary. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for nostalgia, enemy, homeland, and the embittered intimacy of a country carried too long inside language, not as a fixed lesson about Iraq. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Nostalgia, My Enemy: Poems belongs in the translated poetry library because it brings a major Iraqi poet into the library through the ache of exile without simplifying it.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.