Nettles: Poems

The new collection by the Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata, the author of She Says, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

it could only have been elsewhere the sun's anger overturned the country men who came from the wounded side of the river knocked on our borders

I say men so as not to say locusts

—from "Nettles"

In Nettles, Vénus Khoury-Ghata brings her impulses for lyric poetry and for stark narrative together into four enchanting sequences. Each confronts the realities of ...