This Terror That Knows No Borders

KARAN

Nur, I love how your poems carry an alertness to rupture (war, exile, grief) and yet they don’t operate from collapse. Instead, they listen: to birds, to jackals, to mothers, to memory. There’s a spiritual and political vigilance in your attention to the natural world, and I think it reshapes the role of lyric witness. Let’s begin here: when you write about place, what are you also writing toward? And what are you resisting?

NUR

Karan, thank you for such a generous and thoughtful observation. I’m happy you feel my poems don’t operate from collapse. I do think of writing as a way of speaking against collapse.

But I’m struggling to answer. Maybe because this question of vigilance is something I return to again and again when I write, and in that sense, the answer feels intimate and ungraspable. But let me try to begin somewhere. Many of these poems were written in Lebanon, during a time of deep crisis. There were wildfires, protests, the banking collapse, a pandemic, the port explosion, war. Life became a cycle of waiting: for money, fuel, medicine, electricity, water. The everyday was bewildering and consuming, and it shaped how we related to each other, and to language and time.

Writing, though, depends on listening. And it can be hard to listen during crisis mode, when everything demands a reaction. My hope is that the poems lean into that tension. For me, vigilance recognizes that there is something larger than rupture or survival. That’s what I try to write toward: the vastness and wisdom of the jackals, the birds, the mothers but also the imperfect, restless effort of trying to listen to them.

KARAN

Your poems often move like spells: “Desire” unfurls as if lit by a dozen candles, “Animal Grief” begins like a folktale and ends in a howl. There’s a poetic logic that’s sensual but sharply structured. What does your writing process look like — structurally, emotionally, spatially? How do you begin a poem, and how do you know when it’s done?

NUR

Most poems begin for me with the senses. Something I hear, see, feel. I stay with that detail until it begins to connect with others, in hopes it finds its own shape. Today, for instance, I walked through Graça, a hilly Lisbon neighborhood, and the autumn wind reminded me of my mother opening her kitchen window in Tripoli to announce that September had arrived. If that moment enters a poem, I would hope something else also emerges. That’s how I know a poem is happening: when it surprises me, or begins to lean into a larger structure shaped by another poem or by form itself.

I wrote a draft of “Desire” more than five years ago, at a time where Beirut felt incredibly generous. My friends and I were in love with someone or something new every day. We danced so much! I completed the poem later, at a much different time, but I wanted to stay loyal to that intensity, to have the rush provide the structure. Other poems, like “Hamra”, followed a different impulse. “Hamra” was about inhabiting a neighborhood, having it reflect back a sober but generous mood.

Lately I’ve been thinking of poems (though this is a simplification, of course) as falling into two kinds: those that work like maps, and those that exist as locations. A map guides you from one street to the next, it leads you through a thought, a feeling, an idea, until you arrive somewhere. A location is different. It welcomes you, or doesn’t. But it asks you to stay put, to notice its textures and atmosphere, to inhabit it or observe it in hopes of understanding it better.

In both cases, I’m equally drawn to structure and movement. For me, a poem is never just overflow or release. There is instinct, yes, but there is also a frame.

KARAN

I want to talk about “Animal Grief,” (forthcoming in Poetry) which feels like the spiritual and political spine of this portfolio. There’s this line — “this room we’ve tucked terror in, / this terror that knows no borders” — and the “howl” that breaks containment. The poem’s so layered: memory, mourning, border violence, etymology, wildness, love. How did that poem come into being, and what does it still hold for you?

NUR

Many of us feel deeply frustrated about the inadequacy of language. How, in the face of relentless genocide in Gaza, there are “no words.” The terror is too vast. Over the past couple years, I’ve found myself returning to the idea of wailing. I remembered the women I grew up seeing at funerals, or sometimes on television, gathered in a corner to wail. Even when the ritual was partly performative, it offered something essential: a release from the pressure to reason, to contain, to remain composed. Our political reality calls for a collective funeral, I think, a space for raw, unmediated grief.

Not long after Israel’s fragile ceasefire, the Green Southerners, a wild protection group in Lebanon, reported spotting a golden jackal in Aitaroun, a border town that had been heavily bombed by Israel. The jackal startled me. Its sharp gaze, the stubborn survival despite white phosphorus. I began to read about jackals: their kinship bonds, the traits that allow them to endure. The howling of jackals, I learned, is a form of communication that keeps them connected to their group and marks territory. What struck me most was its choral quality, the way one cry summons another.

As I wrote, I thought of my friends Nour, Leila, Racha, who are from the South. Over the years they’ve taken me to their orchards, to lunches under citrus and olive trees their families have tended for generations. I missed them deeply. I thought of their fear for the land they love, their land whose orchards are being burnt, trees uprooted, soil poisoned.

So the poem tries to hold both rage and care: rage at destruction, and care in the attempt to reach across it. My friend Sima reminded me yesterday of Auden’s famous line from “September 1, 1939,”: We must love one another or die. Auden would later disown the line, revise it into the starker: We must love one another and die. But I think there’s a reason we still insist on the first version. We want to believe that love is urgent, that though death is inevitable violence shouldn’t be.

KARAN

Your work often troubles time. Poems slip between past and present, epilogue and preface. I’m thinking of “Photograph,” and “This Old War, Again.” Even when a poem feels diaristic, it has the quality of an afterimage. What is your relationship to time in your work? Does poetry allow you to reorder or re-enter it?

NUR

Carol Ann Duffy writes in “Hours”: We find an hour together/spend it not on flowers or wine, but the whole of the summer sky and a grass ditch. A poem, like a dream or being in love, interrupts our ideas of linear time. It turns what has passed into what endures.

But my work is also haunted by looping. There is such stuck-ness where I am writing from. In Lebanon, we’ll often watch an old film or entertain a medieval poem, and there is this grim, uncanny feeling: oh, but this could have been made today, why does nothing change?

“This Old War, Again” is a found poem from Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, a marvelous little book written in the 1970s, during Lebanon’s civil war, but very alive to the present mood. The narrator herself experiences time as distorted and elliptical. She wanders Beirut’s decay and asks: “but how does one cure the memory?” My friend Gab, a wonderful photographer, and I have been thinking of that question for some time. We don’t have an answer but we’ve agreed that leaning into the words and images of those who came before us is an attempt at this cure.

KARAN

There’s a tenderness, too, to your political voice. It builds power through specificity, image, melancholy. The jackal, the orange trees, Karantina’s rooftop, the girl carrying prosecco. What’s your relationship to the “political poem” as a frame, and how do you resist making poetry merely a tool of explanation? Especially since political poems run a huge risk of being reductive or fall into the territory of propaganda, and are basically hard to do well.

NUR

In Beirut, if you sit outside for a coffee, you must contend with the sound of Israeli drones or the smell of uncollected garbage or the sight of another tower rising empty. I like to believe that if a poem is honest, the politics will be there. It is impossible for it not to be.

Elias Khoury said in an interview with The Paris Review: “I try not to write about war, but to write from within it.” And a couple of months before he died, he wrote that Palestinian resistance is “a model from which I have learned to love life every day.” This moves me deeply. It feels close to what I am trying to do. To write from within a place, to love and be shaped by those with whom I share it.

KARAN

I was quite moved by “Foresight.”. The intimacy between mother and daughter in that one was quiet but seismic. What has writing taught you about love in familial forms? And how do you navigate the tenderness and guilt that sometimes accompany it?

NUR

There’s this intricate poem by Sara Kamel called “Because of My Mother” with a line: Everywhere I go I make a temporary mosque because of my mother. I’ve returned to it often because it feels so true of my mother, though I’d change it slightly: Everywhere I go there is a temporary mosque because of my mother. That inheritance makes me want to extend something of my mother’s devotion and gentle love. Writing is one way I try to do that. In that sense, I’m not sure writing has taught me about familial love as much as it’s been activated by it from the start.

The poem is obsessed with the word “for.” Because of, in service of, in dedication to. That circling of cause and effect mirrors the mother-daughter bond. A relationship of forgiveness and fear, but also everyday tenderness. You watch your mother cook, you go to a play together, you giggle. But there is an undercurrent of grief in such closeness.

As for guilt. Is it possible to be a daughter without it? My friends and I talk often about the guilt of having freedoms our mothers didn’t, of making choices that go against what they might have wished for us, the ache of watching them age. There’s an idea that the deepest love is free of guilt. I’d really like someone to teach me how.

KARAN

Some of your poems explore memory, others desire. And some, like “Epilogue as Preface” or “This Old War, Again,” feel prophetic. I’m curious how you approach tone. Is it intuitive, or do you shape it deliberately? And what role does voice (capital V) play in your poems?

NUR

I’m fascinated by how volatile a day in a life can feel. You can leave a film or a conversation with a friend filled with this sense of largeness, of completeness, and an hour later be undone by a stubbed toe or by doom-scrolling Instagram. I love human inconsistency. I love that we are profound, absurd, brave, shallow. There’s this Joyce Carol Oates profile in The New Yorker about how Oates has spent her life circling the question of whether there is such a thing as a self, or an essence. Or whether we’re just changeable, performing fragments.

Poetry, I think, can be understood in that way too. Performing fragments. Or as different characters inhabiting a shared space, trying to speak to or over one another. Maybe a poetry collection is just a bar with different people.

I drafted “Epilogue as Preface” during Israel’s war on Lebanon. Avichay Adraee, the IOF’s Arabic spokesperson, was tweeting out where strikes would happen next (so absurd, yes). On the night before the ceasefire, Israel’s bombardment expanded to maximize destruction. One of the red dots fell over my neighborhood in Hamra, in the apartment I’d lived in with my brother. We weren’t there, thankfully. It was such a horrible night but I’m very ashamed to admit I worried about my library, what would happen to my books if the strike hit our building. The poem began from that shame but didn’t stay there. It shifted into a voice much larger than mine, urging us to keep moving, to understand that the crossing over can be the meaning. Anyways it’s always a bit funny and strange talking about your own poem. It makes me feel a bit delusional. But yes, tone can be intuitive but it also gets shaped by these mysterious shifts.

KARAN

There’s a lot of joy in these poems too — sometimes quiet, sometimes lush. “Desire” shimmers with pleasure, “Life Force in Seville” with the beauty of a found connection, and “Hamra” feels like a benediction. Do you think of joy as something to be written toward? Or does it arrive despite everything?

NUR

I recently reread Zadie Smith’s “Joy,” one of my favourite essays, where she distinguishes between pleasure and joy. She describes joy as “that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight,” not as an emotion you possess but as one you enter. Annihilating in its totality. Reminds me of the euphoria we felt during Lebanon’s protests in 2019,  a collective high so intense that we’ve spent years trying to recover from it. I am very intrigued by this distinction.

But if I think of joy more simply, as “great pleasure,” then yes, I think it’s necessary to make space for it, in life and in writing. Some poems in my collection October were written at a time when I couldn’t actually feel joy, but by revising toward it, or writing into it, I noticed I was creating room for it.

And then, sometimes, of course, joy simply arrives on its own. “Life Force in Seville” is very much about that. That there are people you haven’t met who will change your life.

I don’t know if you’ve read or watched Olive Kitteridge. In the final scene of the HBO adaptation, Olive, who’s ridden with grief, lies in the arms of another widower. She looks out the window at birds over the ocean. “This world”, she whispers. “Baffles me but I am not ready to leave it.”  People, epiphanies, small pleasures. They do arrive, despite everything.

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: There’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes—poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? And do you feel it moving elsewhere?

NUR

I’d probably place my poems closest to the heart. I feel a sort of softness and aliveness in them that seem to belong there. I would hope to move toward other axes, though. Especially the soul, which feels more expansive and elusive, and the body because it is so wise and intuitive. I don’t think I listen to my body enough.

KARAN

What is some of the best piece(s) of advice you’ve received that’s made a significant difference in your poetic practice?

NUR

Befriend your solitude, lean into the quiet. Take social media breaks. Listen deeply, everything has a pulse. Write down the things you’re sure you’ll never forget because most likely you will. Approach your work with discipline but also lightheartedness. Give your work feet so it can walk far away from you.

KARAN

Would you kindly offer our readers a poetry prompt—something strange, simple, or rigorous—to help them begin a new poem?

NUR

I really like the Annie Dilliard quote of “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Write a poem detailing your perfect day. Channel your inner Lou Reed – fantasise about the people you share it with, let the hours grow as large or little as they need to. Then tell us what has kept you from living it, or what might happen if you did.

KARAN

Please also recommend a piece of art—a film, a painting, a song (anything other than a poem)—that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone would sit with.

NUR

I’d recommend Ziad Rahbani’s music, especially his album Hodou Nisbi (Relative Calm). He was one of Lebanon’s giants, a witty and subversive and generous composer. His death is such a loss. But his art really holds a lot of the country’s spirit.

Also Irish novels. The Irish are so good with mood and humor; they’ve mastered the English language while always seeming a little suspicious of it. That sensibility has taught me a lot about how to approach writing Beirut and its “troubles” without being didactic or explanatory. Claire Keegan, Louise Kennedy, Wendy Erskine, Kevin Barry, Andrew Comiskey. Such great company in heartbreak and laughter.

KARAN

And finally, Nur, since we believe in studying masters’ masters—who are the poets that have shaped your sense of what’s possible in language, your strongest influences?

NUR

Kwame Dawes, Forugh Farrokhzad, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Jane Hirshfield, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Raymond Carver, Najwan Darwish, Naomi Shihab Nye, Fernando Pessoa, Iman Mersal, Maya Abul-Hayyat, Nazim Hikmet.

And then there are Arabic poets I encounter because of music, like Ahmad Rami and Ibrahim Naji, whose work entered my life through tarab.

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