Overview

Where Do You Live? is a bilingual, collaborative collection of questions and responses in Arabic and English, written and co-translated by Iraqi poet Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr and American poet Jennifer Jean-with the aid of Iraqi translators Tamara Al-Attiya and Wadaq Qais. In this intensely intimate book, poet talks to poet, and poem talks to poem. The process of the book's creation is a profound gesture towards peace and healing by women who believe in the enduring power of open-hearted dialogue. The ""where"" in question isn't limited to a physical space but to the places minds and souls linger or reside.

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Where do you live? is both the title and the driving question at the heart of this epistolary poetic dialogue between two poets scarred by the fire of war-Iraqi poet Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr and American poet Jennifer Jean. Poem by poem, ably co-translated by Wadaq Qais and Tamara Al-Attiya, these two poets find themselves reaching each other-touching across tongues-in this sisterhood of poems, despite the vast geographical and cultural distances between Mosul and Massachusetts, Iraq and America, states formerly at war. But in Jean's words, ""like love, music is perfectly untranslatable-/it gathers us together."" And in Jabr's words, since poetry ""introduced me to myself,"" in these poems we can be gathered and introduced to our widest selves. - Philip Metres, author of Fugitive/Refuge Where do you live? أين تعيش؟, a collaborative poetry collection by Jennifer Jean and Hanaa Ahmad Jabr, with co-translators Wadaq Qais and Tamara Al-Attyia, bridges divides to unite women whose histories and traditional roles might once have kept them apart. Together, they create a shared poetic space that embodies Václav Havel's idea that the spirit needs the world more than isolated thought. These transcendent poems explore how home reveals and conceals itself, shaped by longing, memory, and transformation. One poem laments, ""No homeland keeps a chest where my head can cry,"" while another marvels, ""You can live forever/in a poem."" With clarity and humanity, Where do you live? أين تعيش؟ reflects the unbroken spirit of those navigating the shifting contours of identity: ""Mid-air miracles/akin to solid ground."" -Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest ""Jennifer Jean and Hanaa Ahmad Jabr dare bridge the hardest gulfs: those created by the seemingly intractable conditions of national enmity and war. In concept and accomplishment, these poems manifest the types of exchanges necessary to compassion, especially as they take up powerful tensions and sisterhoods. This work is effectively dialogic, vulnerable, and brave."" -Danielle Legros Georges, Boston Poet Laureate

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