Difficult by Rewa Zeinati

ISBN: 978-1-939728-64-7

Publication Date: May 31, 2024

Author: Rewa Zeinati

Location: Doha, Qatar and Richmond, Virginia

Distribution: Distributed by Diode Editions

 

To what end do we admit the traumas we’ve inherited, the transgressions we’ve endured? How do we liberate our bodies from the choices we’ve made or the ones made on our behalf without permission? How do we transcend learned separateness and begin to move towards all that is perceived as not enough? How do we insist that it is in fact enough?

 

“At once elegiac and fearless, Difficult will awaken you to the currents of power and desire that make a mockery of our precarious social configurations. I’m in awe of Zeinati’s exacting honesty, her searing and necessary questions, as she follows the livingbreathingbody through war zones and oceans, childhood and middle life, eventually making an unsteady home in the mouth of empire. If you come to these poems with the questions that most haunt you, you’ll find a sisterhood of truths, a relatable madness that’s as sharp and transcendent as the sea.”

 

— Brynn Saito, author of Under a Future Sky

 

“In Difficult, Zeinati asks necessary questions about the female body, marriage, capitalism, and the countries she leaves and returns to. She offers us words like “motherbody,” “humanhands,” and “everywhereness.” She gifts us poems filled with power, tenderness, rage, and heartbreak. Please read this moving, unflinching collection.”

— Zeina Hashem Beck, author of O

 

“Difficult is unmistakably a book of the present moment—the present tense and everyday life dominate the poems. Yet Zeinati’s voice and vision bear all the markers of hard-earned insights, of someone who has arrived at them through the clarity of hindsight and the sanity of distance. Given this, a remarkable achievement of these poems is their refusal to be singular in any way—not tonally, topically, or even poetically. Like the world they look at, these poems are teeming with surprise and variation. They are at times unsettling and startling, at others whimsical and dreamy. And they are, without exception, reliable and endearing.”

 

— Hayan Charara, author of These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit

 

Rewa Zeinati is an award-winning poet, essayist, educator, and copywriter. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Bullets & Orchids (Corrupt Press, 2013) and the founding editor of Sukoon magazine. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from the American University of Beirut and an M.F.A from the University of Missouri, Saint Louis. Her poems, essays, and translations have been published in various literary journals and anthologies including Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Natural Bridge, The Common, Best Small Fictions, discontent, Mizna, The Spectacle, The Markaz Review, AAWW, New England Review, among others.