The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat

With her first full-length poetry collection, Sara M Saleh introduces us to the polychromatic lives of girls and women as they come into being amidst war, colonial and patriarchal violence, and exile and migration. This searing work interrogates and represents the complexity of Arab-Australian Muslim women’ s identities as they negotiate an irresistible world full of music and family, grit and grief, love and loss. Saleh’ s poetry is not only an inherently political act, but a deeply personal one, charged with multilayered conversations and meditations amongst three generations of women in Sara’ s family. Her poems dazzle with an incantatory force of spirit, survival and selfhood, proving without a doubt that Saleh is one of this country’ s most compelling contemporary poets.

Sara M Saleh is a writer/poet, human rights lawyer, and the daughter of Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian migrants. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published widely and she is co-editor of the ground-breaking 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other. Her first novel is Songs for the Dead and the Living. Sara has run writing workshops in countless classrooms, community spaces, and festivals across the country, and has performed nationally and internationally. Sara is the first and only poet to win both the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Sara M Saleh is a writer/poet, human rights lawyer, and the daughter of Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian migrants. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published widely and she is co-editor of the ground-breaking 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other. Her first novel is Songs for the Dead and the Living. Sara has run writing workshops in countless classrooms, community spaces, and festivals across the country, and has performed nationally and internationally. Sara is the first and only poet to win both the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Judith Wright Poetry Prize.

Prelude: Self-cartography forgotten girls broken ghazal for broken door Aubade for the Ancestors The Year That Changed Everything City/Sitti of Grief Fi Mahattet Masr You, an Effigy little city Recipe for dinner and destruction Ode to Garbage (akh ya Libnen) Reading Darwish at Qalandia Checkpoint Min hala2 la wein? Live from Gaza flirty girls The (Not So) Secret Life of 3arab Girls: Our Raqs Is Sharqi (An Intermittent Ghazal) Kan ya Makan/Groppi Woman crying uncontrollably in the next stall responds Stone Ode to the WS train lines aka ‘ Evil in the Suburbs’ The Fever (Nights Like This) Bad Immigrant This poem has a mother wound … All the places my father lost his faith Punctuation as Organised Violence Border Control: Meditations Reading Darwish at the Museum of Falasteen The Purging There are no colonisers in this poem girls who live forever Here, There: a Ghazal Thistle [to lose a lover/country] After the Apocalypse A Poetics of Forgetting Elegy for a Body Palindrome for a good girl Progressive (White Lover) Eid 2016 (little and big) Headlines The End of the World Unholy Verses Lexicon French Facelift Ode to Teta’ s Building The day home didn’ t change Aunty has an answer for everything: idioms & other heirlooms There would be no jazz LIFE SENTENCE(S) Aubade for the Alleyway Afterlude: Love Poem to Consciousness Notes Acknowledgements