Overview

On Distance by Emily Ahmed is a luminous debut collection that spans a decade of writing, beginning in her teenage years and culminating during a coming-of-age period as she grappled with notions of solitude, loneliness, and finding community. What began as scattered reflections evolved into a deeply introspective project in an effort to make sense of self, memory, and belonging through language. Blending myth and modernity, these poems explore myth-making, love, and the search for home. Ahmed reminds us that stories are life-saving acts of meaning-making, myths we return to for empathy and guidance. With lyrical grace and striking clarity, On Distance reveals how myth, memory, and survival intertwine to illuminate the distances we live and love through.

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Reviews

Myth and modernity weave together in On Distance, Emily Ahmed's first collection of poems - it is a remarkable book of quiet insight; the beauty inside these poems is born from their purity and striking clarity, but purity is no place of piousness here and Ahmed approaches it with a reverence for ambivalence. An instability in language, location, and love cohere in the poems; the elusive search for home drives the speaker to probe language which offers no resolution - in this, we readers, receive a gift. -Elizabeth Houston, author of Standard American English The memoir and the memorial, with all their ""dangerous tongues"" building and destroying bridges, the Arab as American and the American as Arab: Emily Ahmed, a poet who aspires to ""age like a country,"" or like a Penelope, always between leaving and being left. -Fady Joudah, author of [...] In On Distance Emily Ahmed writes about cities with blue eyelashes. Some of her poems capture the language of separation. They ask us to love in the old language. They remind us to remember family as one tries to rebuild the heart. There are lines that glitter in this collection. This book introduces an exciting new voice to our literary landscape. -E. Ethelbert Miller Writer and literary activist 2023 Grammy Award Finalist in the category of Spoken Word and Poetry On Distance is a rich and vivid dive into family, memory, exile, longing, and the attendant (and seemingly necessary) myth-making these give way to. Collectively, and at times individually, the poems here refuse to be relegated to any single goal; they are instead exuberantly multi-dimensional: heartbreaking, candid, fantastical, passionate, funny. -Hayan Charara, author of These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit

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