Emily Ahmed: A Conversation on Memory, Place and the Self
You’re invited to the online launch of On Distance! Join us to connect with the author, hear poetry, ask questions, and be part of the launch buzz.
Hosted by Gia Rojas, featuring Emily Ahmed.
On Distance is a luminous debut poetry collection that traces a decade of poetic inquiry into solitude, memory, and the search for belonging. This book launch celebrates the arrival of a powerful new voice in contemporary poetry and the beauty of words that illuminate the distances we live and love through.
Praise for On Distance
Myth and modernity weave together in On Distance, Emily Ahmed’s first collection of poems – it is a remarkable book of quiet insight; the beauty inside these poems is born from their purity and striking clarity, but purity is no place of piousness here and Ahmed approaches it with a reverence for ambivalence. An instability in language, location, and love cohere in the poems; the elusive search for home drives the speaker to probe language which offers no resolution - in this, we readers, receive a gift.
Elisabeth Houston, author of Standard American English
The memoir and the memorial, with all their “dangerous tongues” building and destroying bridges, the Arab as American and the American as Arab: Emily Ahmed, a poet who aspires to “age like a country,” or like a Penelope, always between leaving and being left.
Fady Joudah, author of [...]
In On Distance Emily Ahmed writes about cities with blue eyelashes. Some of her poems capture the language of separation. They ask us to love in the old language. They remind us to remember family as one tries to rebuild the heart. There are lines that glitter in this collection. This book introduces an exciting new voice to our literary landscape.
E. Ethelbert Miller
Writer and literary activist
2023 Grammy Award Finalist in the category of Spoken Word and Poetry