These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit: Poems: Poems

(Paperback)

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Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist

A thoughtful new collection of poems, one that deconstructs the deceptively simple question of what it means to be gooda good person, a good citizen, a good teacher, a good poet, a good father.

With These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, Hayan Charara presents readers with a medley of ambitious analyses, written in characteristically wry verse. He takes philosophers to task, jousts with academics, and scrutinizes hollow gestures of empathy, exposing the dangers of thinking ourselves separate / from [our] thoughts and experiences. After all, No work of love / will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart. But how do we act on fullness of heart How, knowing as we do that genocide is inscribed in our earliest and holiest texts

Thoughtful but never preachy, Charara sits beside us, granting us access to lifes countless unglamorous dilemmas: crushing a spider when we promised we wouldnt, nearing madness from a newborns weeping, resenting our lovers for what happened in a dream. Good poems demand to be written from inside the poet, we are reminded. And that is where we find ourselves here: inside a lively and ethical mind, entertained by Chararas good company even as goodness challenges us to do more.

Reviews

Praise for These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit

Whether chronicling Arab American experiences of discrimination or relating uncomfortable episodes in a marriage, these poems favor an honesty that will elicit laughter if it doesn't make one cry . . . These surprising and transgressive poems confront the everyday contradictions of living with equal parts biting insight and grace.Publishers Weekly

Politics, philosophy, and what it means to live in America are all themes that are highlighted and pulled apart . . . Charara both turns away from traditions and keeps to them, making for many unexpected moments . . . A powerful and impactful collection.Booklist

[Charara] is a multifaceted writer, equally comfortable in the long, languid line and the short poem, terse and biting. His fourth poetry collection, These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, shows off his range . . . Charara offers few answers but insists the questions themselves are worthwhile.Shelf Awareness, Starred Review

Strange and dazzling . . . You can almost see the mind leaping from lilypad to lilypad, each transition both an outgrowth of the previous sentence and yet also deliciously surprising.Jesse Nathan, McSweeneys

This entire collection dances between the direct and the subtle, at once using language that is both unflinching and delicate, both emphatic yet restrained. These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit is a complex and stunning collection that exemplifies Charara's incredible ability to write about life's complexities with grace and curiosity.Marissa Ahmadkhani, The West Review

Chararas precise and imagistic poems will delight" David Starkey, California Review of Books

In this collection, the process is not centered on the poet, but is made of a constant, lively, and sincere contact and combination with the larger community that is the world.Lcia Leo, RHINO Magazine

Hayan Chararas These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit is both lushly transcendental and companionable, imbuing the cathedral on fire, the match that set the fire, and the spiders under the pews, with an equal measure of significance and holiness. Charara has developed a level of masteryin life and in poetrythat allows him to shift from litany to epic to haiku sequence to elegy to hybrid prose, from the enigmatic to the declarative, the tragic to comic, from Lebanon to Detroit, with agility, clear in his judgments (Id much prefer spending an afternoon / with a bunch of jockeys or car mechanics than with philosophers) and steadfast in his global and personal rage and grief. Every seed a heart, every heart / a minefield, he writes. In this way, Chararas astonishing collection defies easy dualisms and locates the source of love and violence in these, those, this, and thatand in ourselves.Diane Seuss

Reading Hayan ChararasThese Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, I kept thinking of a line from Gwendolyn Brooks: A man must bring / To music what his mother spanked him for / When he was two. Chararas music is undeniable. His searching lyric, which has been a lodestar for me over the years, crescendos here at dazzling new heights. A man has a hotel liaison with an ex-wife, tries to quit smoking. Across the ocean, vegetables grow over windowsills while children looking for candy are picked off by snipers. The dailiness of each astoundsas in the world, so in these poems. Charara isnt afraid to say it plain: We live at the pleasure of people with enormous power / and very little compassion. Thats what awes me most about Chararas work, his ability to sing the difficult thing with real clarity: The mantra today the same as yesterday. / We must become different.Kaveh Akbar

Hayan Chararas These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit repeatedly and revealingly places the present beside the historical, the self beside the other, and the basic impulse to possess and preserve beside the inescapability of loss. The poems are simultaneously erudite and plainspoken; at times they are unflinching in their considerations of violence and history, while elsewhere they are playful and even laugh-out-loud funny. Always, they see the totality of the human condition, which, when viewed both up close and from a great distance, is, in Chararas words, a composite / of violence, vengeance, and theft, / ingenuity, too, and forms of love unique / to men and women, the only species / that knows, consciously, what others of its kind / thought and did thousands of years before. This is among the very best books of poems Ive read in years.Wayne Miller

Author Bio

Hayan Charara is the author of These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit. He is a poet, childrens book author, essayist, and editor. His other collections of poems include Something Sinister, The Sadness of Others, and The Alchemists Diary. His childrens book, The Three Lucys, received the New Voices Award Honor, and he edited Inclined to Speak, an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry. With Fady Joudah, he is also a series editor of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. His honors include a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucille Joy Prize in Poetry from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, the John Clare Prize, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston.