Adonis's poetry and prose writings have aroused much controversy in the Arab world, both for their provocative content and their arresting style. Grounded in traditional poetic styles, Adonis developed a new way of expressing modern sentiments. Although influenced by classical poets, Adonis started at a relatively early age to experiment with the prose poem, giving it density, tension, metaphors, and rhythm. He also broke with the diction and style of traditional poems, introducing a new and powerful syntax and new imagery. Through his innovative use of language, imagery, and narrative technique, Adonis has played a leading role in the revolutionizing of Arabic literature. He has garnered many of the world’s major poetry prizes. In A Time Between Ashes and Roses Adonis evokes the wisdom of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, liberally excerpting from and remolding its images; the modernism of William Carlos Williams; and the haunting urban imagery of poets such as Baudelaire, Cavafy, and Lorca. Three long poems allow him to explore profoundly the human condition, by examining language and love, race and favor, faith and dogma, war and ruin. In the lyrical “This Is My Name” and “Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings,” Adonis ponders Arab defeat and defeatism. In “A Grave for New York,” he reflects on the same theme by interrogating Vietnam-era America. This bilingual edition, presenting the poems in Arabic and English on facing pages, is enhanced by a critical bibliography of Adonis’s works, providing an accessible and crucial reference for scholars of modern and Middle Eastern poetry and culture. Shawkat M. Toorawa’s vivid and eloquent translation finally makes the poet’s signature work available to an English-speaking audience; the effect is no less powerful than were the first translations of Pablo Neruda into English.

"Frontispiece: Poem and calligraphy by Adonis, XXXX. Translated by Bassam Frangieh" --T.p. verso.

One of the greatest poets of Arabic literature, Adonis's work often centres on the process of petic creation, but his work has somehow remained highly appealing to Arab readers, and he has had, perhaps, more influence in terms of innovation and modernity than any other contemporary Arab poet. Twice he has been a finalist for the Nobel Prize. For Adonis, poetry is a vision, a leap outside of established concepts, a change in the order of things and the way we look at them.''

Calling poetry a "question that begets another question," Adonis sets into motion this stream of unending inquiry with difficult questions about exile, identity, language, politics, and religion. Repeatedly mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate, Adonis is a leading figure in twentieth-century Arabic poetry. Restless and relentless, Adonis explores the pain and otherness of exile, a state so complete that absence replaces identity and becomes the exile's only presence. Exile can take many forms for the Arabic poet, who must practice his craft as an outsider, separated not only from the nation of his birth but from his own language; in the present as in the past, that exile can mean censorship, banishment, or death. Through these poems, Adonis gives an exquisite voice to the silence of absence.

As the main character lives an entire millennium, he witnesses firsthand various milestones of forgotten generations such as the Crusades, the Renaissance, and the devastating World Wars in an emotionally charged way that no textbook could ever describe. Savor the deepest hopes and fears of well-known individuals of ages past. Unveil the delicate humanity within history's heroes and villains, who are not much different than us. History is no longer a detached subject, but an intimate force like a grandparent's weary heart and unconditional love, with an inextinguishable promise of hope for the future. As the pages unfurl, you will learn things you may not even know about yourself. Discover the simplest but most profound secrets of life. Discover how your very existence was ultimately determined a thousand years ago, and how you, yourself have been carving the next millennium since the day you were born, engraving your own name in the essence of time itself. Ashes and Roses of a Millennium holds a legacy of love that will surely provoke a deep and intimate passion for history in the young and old alike.

What has happened since de Man and Derrida first read Austin? How has the encounter between deconstruction and the performative affected each of these terms? In addressing these questions, this book brings together scholars whose works have been provoked in different ways by the encounter of deconstruction and the performative. Following Derrida's appeal to any rigorous deconstruction to reckon with Austin's theorems and his ever growing commitment to rethink and rewrite the performative and its multiple articulations, it is now urgent that we reflect upon the effects of a theoretical event that has profoundly marked the contemporary scene. The contributors to this book suggest various ways of re-reading the heritage and future of both deconstruction and the performative after their encounter, bringing into focus both the constitutive aporia of the performative and the role it plays within the deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition.

Enter a hidden world of winged vampire warriors—and the women they are sworn protect. Born of Ashes is the fourth breathtaking novel in paranormal romance author Caris Roane's Guardians of Ascension series... For years, she was kept as a human slave—one of seven unwilling "blood donors" for the death vampires who thirst for absolute power. Now, Fiona is a free woman, haunted by her memories of being strapped to a gurney, drained of blood, then revived at the last moment. She lives to avenge her captors—but only one warrior can help her... Jean-Pierre has lived and fought for over two-hundred years. He knows the triumph of slaying a death vampire, but has never known anything like the feelings that arise when he becomes Fiona's guardian. Her beauty, her pain, her passion—and her growing power—consume his senses. Now the warrior must draw his sword once more—and fight the gates of hell itself—for love.

Writing has come face-to-face with a most crucial juncture: to negotiate with the inescapable presence of violence. From the domains of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, this book stages a powerful conversation on questions of cruelty, evil, rage, vengeance, madness, and deception. Beyond the narrow judgment of violence as a purely tragic reality, these writers (in states of exile, prison, martyrdom, and war) come to wager with the more elusive, inspiring, and even ecstatic dimensions that rest at the heart of a visceral universe of imagination. Covering complex and controversial thematic discussions, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh forms an extreme record of voices, movements, and thought-experiments drawn from the inner circles of the Middle Eastern region. By exploring the most abrasive writings of this vast cultural front, the book reveals how such captivating outsider texts could potentially redefine our understanding of violence and its now-unstoppable relationship to a dangerous age.

In this revealing new study, Tarik Sabry and Joe Khalil preside over an original new exploration of Arab culture. They employ subjects as varied as anthropology, media studies, philosophy, political economy and cultural studies to illuminate the relationship between culture, time and publics in an Arab context, whilst also laying the foundations for a much more nuanced picture of Arab society. The diverse themes and locations explored include communities at borders, in rural and urban locations, Syrian drama audiences, Egyptian, Saudi and Tunisian artists and activists and historical and contemporary Arab intellectuals. This fresh empirical research and interdisciplinary analysis illuminate intricate experiences that transcend local, national and religious boundaries and expose how Arab publics combine the media and technology to create a rich experience that shapes their collective imagination and social structure. Providing a grounded orientation to key debates on time and what can be defined as public in modern Arab cultures, Sabry and Khalil address teachers, students and those concerned about the delicate structures that underpin the upheavals of the modern Arab world.

A brilliant new translation of the landmark poetry collection by “the most eloquent spokesman and explorer of Arabic modernity” (Edward Said) Written in the early 1960s, Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is widely considered to be the apex of the modernist poetry movement in the Arab world, a radical departure from the rigid formal structures that had dominated Arabic poetry until the 1950s. Drawing not only on Western influences, such as T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche, but on the deep tradition and history of Arabic poetry, Adonis accomplished a masterful and unprecedented transformation of the forms and themes of Arabic poetry, initiating a profound revaluation of cultural and poetic traditions. Songs of Mihyar is a masterpiece of world literature that rewrites—through Mediterranean myths and renegade Sufi mystics—what it means to be an Arab in the modern world.