An amazing richness of imagery, deep political awareness, an authentic emotional pulse, and a sure mythic imagination mark Deema Shehabi's Thirteen Departures From the Moon. Each poem in this collection is a clear, honest yet intensely transformed communication, dripping with a honey-like sweetness of literary gifts.
— Annie Finch, author of Calendars
Sometimes a new poet appears who has a generous field of vision, a craft at once well-honed and extravagant, and a unique point of view, with narratives that could belong to no one else—a poet who, by being of her specific time and place, writes for the widest world. As Anglophone readers greeted the emergence of Derek Walcott, Yusef Komunyakaa or Eavan Boland, so must we open our eyes and our minds to the poems of Deema Shehabi.
— Marilyn Hacker, author of Names
Poets, if asked 'what is poetry for?' often find themselves stumped for an answer. In this stunning sequence of renga, Marilyn Hacker and Deema Shehabi, have given us that answer. We celebrate these two voices, bleeding in and out of each other, quicksilver, mercurial, eloquent in song and silence, even as they celebrate the human spirit in a ruptured world.
— Mimi Khalvati
The script leaps across/the page to smack/your lips': the sprung rhythms of Diaspo/Renga startle and enchant the ear, as its stories of emigration and exile have the mind leaping between continents. This book's revolutionary form is most revolutionary of all in making serious political engagement and sophisticated poetic pleasure inseparable.
— Fiona Siampson, Professor of Poetry, University of Roehampton
The Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition began when San Francisco poet and bookseller, Beau Beausoleil, called on poets and printmakers to commemorate the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad’s historic bookselling street on March 5th, 2007. This resulted in a collection of broadsides, artists’ books, and an anthology of writing. This anthology was edited by Beau Beausoleil and Deema Shehabi and is entitled Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here: Poets and Writers Respond to the March 5, 2007, Bombing of “Street of the Booksellers.”