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“So you are still determined to sell the three mules?”

“The Wall,” by the massively popular Ahmed Khaled Tawfik (1962-2008) is from his collection “Now I Understand.”

“It was ridiculous, the way the battle of tuk-tuks and microbuses began.”

“The city wakes up in obituaries.”

“I want to step out on my balcony and hang my laughter out on the clothesline, so that passersby can catch hold of it, scale the wall to the fourth floor, and laugh with me.”

“Who am I? / I am not myself.”

In the latest episode of the BULAQ podcast, co-hosts M Lynx Qualey and Ursula Lindsey talk with editor-writer Sara Yasin about the new publication The Key.

Addie Leak talks with Tugrul Mende about the translation process, literary awards, and two very different translations processes: translating one book through a riot of multilingual voicenotes and another by an author who was inaccessible, in an Israeli prison.

Tracing the Ether Contemporary Poetry from Saudi Arabia, ed. Moneera Al-Ghadeer, came out late last year from Syracuse University Press. The anthology brings together 26 poets responding to — and writing a new future for — a rapidly changing Saudi Arabia. Moneera answered a few questions about the collection.

“The word eib rings in my head, it is eib to love, to sing, to get sick, to divorce, to show your emotions…and.…and. I felt these social chains were burdening me with fear, despair, and confusion, and I almost abandoned work on the book, but when I looked at the materials that I had collected, I knew that if I didn’t publish it now, it would never be published.”

” Jaziri wrote poetry with one set of alphabets which at that time were used in four languages: Kurdish, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. Sometimes, he used the four languages in one couplet. His poems are still recited and sung by Kurds. That coexistence of languages was quite natural, the alluring music was convincing, although I sometimes understood almost nothing.”