Fugitive/refuge

Review by Booklist Review

Metres is a well-awarded poet, author of 10 books, and a professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. Fugitive/Refuge is identified as a book-length qasida, and it is a unity, a conceptual work that traces the journey of Metres' ancestors from Lebanon to Mexico to the U.S. Conventional poems are in tension with the documentary evidence--photos, copies of documents, and poems written in the document's blank spaces. Several poems are scattered on the page, as if the words refuse to collect themselves into their ordinary senses. In this scattering, there is a risk of atomization as a form of aggression, as if they must be broken up to remind us of their brokenness. But this isn't news; words are old, subject to misuse. One can't lie or essay the truth without words. Among the notable satisfactions here are the ekphrastic poems that interrogate documents and photographs and some memorable anagrammatic puns: "The urn in return. & the rue."

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The powerful sixth book from Metres (Shrapnel Maps), who is of Lebanese descent, confronts the trials of the present moment--including forced migration, climate change, and nationalism--through his family's migration story. Metres wields poetic forms (among them odes, sonnets, and prayers) to explore themes of loss and resilience. The volume is arranged around the qasida, an ancient Arabic poetic form consisting of three sections: naṣīb (fate), raḥīl (exile), and fakhr (honor or praise). With lyrical mastery, Metres riffs on the famous sonnet by Emma Lazarus found on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." His tonal equivalent contrasts the original with the cry of a "migrant woman" who scrounges for anything that "might fill her children's insides": "We've hidden in swarms/ To escape the dread masters of horror...Welcome us, the deplored./ We stand at the landing of your golden dorm" ("The New New Colossus"). Metres reflects on those "who live their last years/ where they've always lived--/ in another country" in poems that transcend time and place, language and silence, honoring the enduring spirit of those who journey in search of refuge. (Apr.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Poet/activist Metres (Shrapnel Maps), whose family migrated from Lebanon to Mexico in the early 1900s and then to the United States after his great-grandfather's murder, here profitably refracts the refugee experience through his family's history. Emphasizing the pain of a culture lost yet still somehow present, he speaks of "inheriting a key to the door / that exists only in the I remember / of elders" and the ease provided by the sound of the oud, even as it recalls (echoing Robert Frost) "miles of ghosts beneath our sleep." Further details are provided by the intriguing footnoting of an Arabic translation of his poem "The Ballad of Skandar" ("great-grandfather / where have you gone?") and an examination of the family's brutal crossing at Laredo, complete with a reprint of a manifest from the U.S. Department of Labor; exploring the multiple meanings of "manifest" throughout embodies the poet's search for clarity and understanding. Expanding on his theme, Metres offers "A Chronology of Roads" ("Once, salt was the power to cross the unmapped"); crafts multiple poems recalling treacherous sea crossings in fragmented, wave-tossed lines; considers homelessness in the United States; and finally advises "Traveler, there is no road." VERDICT A wide-ranging work of current import, shaped by an intimate and urgent tone that draws in the reader.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

The Other Side In the First World Peace, Uncle Charlie found his mind  outside a country asylum, wound home to meet the sister who always knew he'd survived. Uncle Dom always spoke  of the Second World Peace, how he once gave away a Purple Heart, which never reminded him of anything.  And the marchers marched backward, never showing their backs, unlocked and unloaded every rifle they carried,  breaking ranks in every direction. And the smoke and ash turned back into bone-clothed skin. In Saigon, my father saw  fireworks, wondered when peace would end. If only we trimmed our peace budget, the President says, we might have something  to spend on the latest bionic technology, to erase the scars of peace, since men keep sprouting limbs, and their shrapnel- free faces have a symmetry you only see in times like these. A Map of Migration Routes Each line is arrowed red.  Inside, they tumble across muscled continents like erythrocytes, millions of flesh-tucked skulls hauling  dreams. Red for departure, blue for return. Their lives  shrunk to a single cell  they palm to their chest in bus depots and windowless tents  at night, seeking a signal, a recognizable voice, someone home, lithium ions draining.  When given paper and crayons,  their children draw weapons. Red for departure, blue for return. Like veins, the lines  draw back to the heart, the heart where the rivers flooded,  the fields baked in drought,  where the guns came out-- and guns made love to guns,  making more guns, and the blood began to run. Excerpted from Fugitive/Refuge by Philip Metres All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---