Dear readers,
I’m so thrilled to share with you all the full cover of my new poetry collection, The Lost Arabs (UQP), which you can preorder now.
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I’m truly blessed to have received the endorsements of three brilliant poets in David Malouf, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and Judith Beveridge. Here’s what they had to say:
DAVID MALOUF: The new and powerful voice, public, performative, but also vulnerably intimate, of one of our “children of elsewhere”; painfully confronting the ambiguities of country and heritage, and testing in the boldest terms what enterprise there might be, as Yeats put it, in “walking naked”.
ALI COBBY ECKERMANN: In this collection Omar Sakr writes words to enhance the world, elegiac windows of soul from one who has travelled and seen, requiring a gentle understanding of that which is not gentle, nor can it be. The Lost Arabs is the poetic posture of a man in all his forms standing by the eternal river, who has placed both feet in the sand, and who refuses to sink.
JUDITH BEVERIDGE: This book knocked my breath away, winding me with its pain and damage, yet all the while filling me with the exuberance of reading poetry of such wisdom and dazzle. The tyranny that we can inflict on each other, the harms of family and history, the need for solace and belonging find perfect pitch in line after line of this magnificent collection. There’s an urgent need for this book, it should be on every shelf.
Soon, I’ll share with you all the Acknowledgments page, as there are so many people to thank for helping bring me to this point in my life, as well as a more personal post about where I am at the moment. Thank you all for reading my poems and stories and for following me thus far: in brief, I feel blessed.
Salaam,
Omar
