HOMES

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

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Description

• Vibrant and distinctly modern nature poems written in a charismatic voice, about familiar places and beloved landscapes. Soliman offers a unique perspective on timely issues of immigration, climate change, Indigenous sovereignty, borders, and identity politics.
• Soliman is well known for his performance art and has lots of connections to bookstores and art organizations around the Great Lakes. Hes currently the director of programming for Arab American arts organization Mizna.
• Extensive regional interest. Soliman talks about specific locations and landmarks all around the Great Lakes region.
• 1015 city tour planned at bookstores and arts organizations around Great Lakes, targeting locations featured in poems.

Reviews

Finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2021 Heartland Booksellers Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2021 Big Other Book Award for Poetry
Chicago Tribune, Ten Books to Read This Summer
Ecotone, Most Anticipated Spring Books

In a time of environmental catastrophe and colonial destruction, Solimans sly and shifting poems suggest that moving between various homes makes more sense than trying to construct a static place of complete belongingness. Elizabeth Hoover, Star Tribune

Phrases are broken apart, and often, beautiful and evocative double readings are created. . . . Theres an understanding that connecting dots between ideas, words, or sounds on a page is much like charting a course on a maptheres usually more than one way to get somewhere, and our attention is masterfully directed. Will Russo, Great Lakes Review

Moheb Solimans HOMES is a fascinating study in the differences between place and destinyIt was a port that sank, he writes, not a freighter. Through the collection we visit places to travel, places to live, places to escape. Other times, its a vacancy were visiting. You do not arrive, one poem states, The place arrives. Such vertiginous wandering at once illuminates and troubles the eponymous idea of home. Solimans wild, expansive leapinggeographic and psychicis worth the price of admission alone; the rush of it, the verve. But ultimately what excites me most about this collection is its affirmation that for some of us, there is only one place, one home: the one inside our own mind. Kaveh Akbar

Hummingbird cakes, trumpets. HOMES is a border-crossing, rivering lake escape with exhilarating contemplations and investigations in Great Lakes worlds. The intellectual shape of the work is steeped in borderlands, waters (rivers have mouths, lakes have bodies), branches of endemic life and peopled descendancies. The physical read is choreographed in visual formations with caesura streams pooling, stilling sound and harboring leaps to slashed out to punctuate fractals. Madeline Island, Thunder Bay, Lake Champlain, Molson, Sleeman beer. Rich with mollusks, with diasporic mollusky sand. With lakes and lakes that swallow lakes. With wild road and brimming river voyaging, up alongside otters, ice, massive tankers, while wolfing white doughnuts downthese poems bring us malleable leads from othering crises, give us passage and dream world solution. This is a scintillating, scorching read of seeing, knowing, passing through, and homing, where Moheb Soliman casts the good spell, and we are bound to it. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

HOMES is a meditation on, and a prayer for, the natural world through the body of the Great Lakes. With remarkable infiltrative urban imagination, Moheb Soliman is the echo of what cant be unseen: the domineering, wild life of humans over wildlife. Between a pea and a peacock, recreation and re-creation, in a nuclear canoe toward a lakefront suite, this is the Anthropocene: To be the one the world speaks for / Without first having to be endangered / I am the recycling and the garbage. This spectacular book is as inventive and daring as it is tender and piercingin syncopated lyric like a genetic sequence, a spliced analog for elegy. Fady Joudah

Author Bio

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest. He has presented writing and performance, installation, and video work at diverse literary, art, and public spaces in the US and Canada with support from the Banff Centre, Pillsbury House, the Joyce Foundation, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Moheb has degrees from The New School and the University of Toronto and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he was program director for the Arab American literary journal and arts organization Mizna.