Beyond On Distance: Poetry Collections Exploring Diaspora & Belonging
Stack of poetry books: On Distance, by Emily Ahmed, Little Houses, by Athena Nassar, O, by Zeina Hashem Beck, Something About Living, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Written by Jayden King
At Elyssar Press, we believe poetry is an invitation to connection and community through the play of language. Poetry is especially important to those of us with diverse cultural backgrounds, offering our readers glimpses into our shared experiences while offering unique perspectives to challenge and transform ways of thinking.
For readers interested in literature exploring themes of belonging, heritage, and family, we have curated a list of five poetry works by women who challenge us to engage with our current moment in revolutionary ways.
This selection includes our own publication, On Distance by Emily Ahmed, a collection grounded in an emergence of identity and belonging. Ahmed spent a decade writing this book, starting as a teenager and finishing it during a period of deep personal reflection and self-discovery. Writing from an Egyptian American perspective, she uses language as a lifeline through her thought-provoking poems. She weaves her reality with ancient mythology and surreal imagery. Ahmed’s poetry is a study of solitude, nostalgia, and what it means to find your place in this world.
On Distance,
Emily Ahmed
At the center of this collection is the concept of modern myth-making as it relates to the Arab American diaspora. Emily Ahmed suggests that the stories we tell ourselves, those that are rooted in both ancestral heritage and modern reality, are essential acts of survival. By weaving ancient archetypes into her contemporary settings through poetry, she explores the distance between heritage and home and the search for a permanent "belonging.”
A study of the tension between isolated loneliness and the restorative power of communal solitude, Ahmed’s verse offers a striking clarity, illuminating the literal and figurative distances we live and love through.
Emily Ahmed is an Egyptian-American writer and artist. Her poems are published in Trampoline, Sienna Solstice, Plentitudes, Running Dog, Mizna, and more. She studied Arabic, Middle Eastern Studies, and art in Minnesota and throughout North Africa and Southwest Asia. On Distance is her first book of poetry.
Something about Living,
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Something About Living explores Palestinian life through the lens of American language, revealing a legacy of obfuscation and erasure. What happens when language only permits ongoing disasters to be packaged neatly for consumption and subsequent disposal?
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is author of three books of poetry: Something About Living (UAkron, 2024), winner of the 2024 National Book Award and winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry, Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award and honorable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award, Water & Salt (Red Hen), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honorable mention for the 2018 Arab American Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize, and Letters from the Interior (Diode, 2019), finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her writing has been published in journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Revie, the Nation, Poets.org, Protean, and Prairie Schooner and in anthologies including The Long Devotion (Georgia Press), We Call to the Eye and the Night (Persea Press), and Gaza Unsilenced (Just World Books). She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series “Poems from Palestine” at the Baffler magazine.
Little Houses,
Athena Nassar
Athena Nassar's piercing debut full-length collection, Little Houses, unravels one American family's conflicted Southern existence. Nassar's speaker first surfaces from an alligator's mouth to beckon readers through a series of revolving doors. Behind one door, she reckons with a complex history of colonization; behind another, Princess Peach mourns her own hard-coded impotence. In this way, Nassar does not shy from exploring all sides of her speaker's sexuality, heritage, and familial connections. To occupy her Little Houses is to find freedom in contradiction.
Athena Nassar is an Egyptian-American poet, essayist, and short story writer from Atlanta, Georgia. She is an Interlochen Arts Academy alum and is currently an undergraduate student at Emerson College, where she is the head poetry editor of The Emerson Review. She is the recipient of the 2019 Scholastic National Gold Medal Portfolio Award, the 2021 San Miguel Writers’ Conference Writing Contest, and the 2021 Academy of American Poets College Prize, among other honors. Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets, The Missouri Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Salt Hill, Lake Effect, New Orleans Review, Zone 3, Sequestrum, The Los Angeles Review, PANK, and elsewhere.
O,
Zeina Hashem Beck
Zeina Hashem Beck writes at the intersection of the divine and the profane, where she crafts elegant, candid poems that simultaneously exude a boundless curiosity and a deep knowingness. Formally electrifying—from lyrics and triptychs to ghazals and Zeina’s own duets, in which English and Arabic echo and contradict each other—O explores the limits of language, notions of home and exile, and stirring visions of motherhood, memory, and faith.
Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her fourth poetry collection, titled This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, is forthcoming from Penguin Books in March 2027. Her third poetry collection, O, won the 2023 Arab American Book Award for poetry and was named a Best Book of 2022 by Lit Hub and The New York Public Library.
The Wild Fox of Yemen: Poems,
Threa Almontaser
A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before, Almontaser’s polyvocal collection sneaks artifacts to and from worlds, repurposing language and adapting to the space between cultures.
Half-crunk and hungry, speakers move with the force of what cannot be contained by the limits of the American imagination, and instead invest in troublemaking and trickery, navigate imperial violence across multiple accents and anthems, and apply gang signs in henna, utilizing any means necessary to form a semblance of home. In doing so, The Wild Fox of Yemen fearlessly rides the tension between carnality and tenderness in the unruly human spirit.
Threa Almontaser is a Yemeni American writer, translator, and multimedia artist from New York City. She holds an MFA from North Carolina State University.
Her first full-length poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press, 2021), was selected by Harryette Mullen as the winner of the 2020 Walt Whitman Award, given by the Academy of American Poets and was long-listed for the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry.
