finalist for the kingsley tufts poetry award

Hayan Charara’s 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 Charara’s 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 I’ve read in years.

—Wayne Miller

Reading Hayan Charara’s These 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.” Charara’s 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 astounds—as in the world, so in these poems. Charara isn’t afraid to say it plain: “We live at the pleasure of people with enormous power / and very little compassion.” That’s what awes me most about Charara’s 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 Charara’s 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 mastery—in life and in poetry—that 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 (“I’d 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, Charara’s astonishing collection defies easy dualisms and locates the source of love and violence in these, those, this, and that—and in ourselves. 

—Diane Seuss

arab american book award winner

It is unusual that the deeply private in American poetry connects to the immensely public at the world stage. It is even a rarer event when this is accomplished with such clarity and disarming language. American poetry needs to pay attention to this book and celebrate the expansive tender vision of Hayan Charara. His poems feed us what we want, and what we think we want, because the poems have made a pact with us: that they will also offer us what we fear. And we accept it all because ultimately this is a book of fearless love. I cannot stop rereading these poems, every one of them so heartbreaking and illuminating, especially “Usage,” a work of such brilliance it will be read for decades to come.

— Fady Joudah

Each time I read Hayan Charara’s insightful, tragic, loving book, and am witness myself to his acts of witness, the chill of poetry runs down my spine and up into my scalp. This necessary work is not like any other, from the short surreal poems that come unflinchingly back to specific human truth to the long “Usage” and its Whitmanian catalogue of what is done to us with daily language.  

—Marilyn Hacker

How can one adequately praise this book? Its modest tone, narrating the elegies, disappointments, and wistful joys of existence cannot withhold the unique power of Charara's sensibility. Accepting us as companions on his journey of growth and healing, he reveals his regard for all creatures, humans and pets, as it refines the dimensions of his own heart. Profundity emerges organically, culled from and delivered in the inflections of daily life. Among his unflinching views of family, the poet's indelible poems to his mother and the confrontation of lost love retrieve both the wisdom of closure and the truth that some griefs can be transformed, not lessened. The Sadness of Others will not leave the hearth of one's consciousness.

 –D.H. Melhem

The Sadness of Others gives us understated, unflinching snapshots of what's finally real about life's changes–going from one home to another, one marriage to another, the moment you discover you forgive someone, and the deprivation you'll never quite mourn: motherlessness. Too damn young to write this well, Hayan Charara uses all his technique to achieve one end: breaking the reader's heart. 

–Diana Goetsch

Hayan Charara is a star–follow him.  

–Naomi Shihab Nye

The place is a city–a magic city–of machines, of cars, of motors. The person is American and is Arab. The sensibility is one of sense and of feeling. The ethics are true and are tough. Alchemy, you know, was to the Greeks, “The Egyptian art,” identified with the land of Khem–the land of 'black earth.' Enter the transmutations of The Alchemist's Diary to see precisely what I mean.  

–Lawrence Joseph

Hayan Charara's debut collection, The Alchemist's Diary, is the work of a poet who possesses a healthy dose of humility and openness to both the wonder and terror of this world. It's a world where everything is suspect, everyone a suspect for crimes real or imagined. These poems are about history and not forgetting, but they are about re-remembering too. Charara understands that it sometimes takes a long time to get the memories right so that we can move forward, either turning our back on those memories or carrying them with us. He writes “we sometimes choose what stays with us.” These poems, both hard-bitten and meditative, capture beautifully the struggle to make those choices. While many of these poems are torn apart by loss, it is memory which stitches them back together. Freeways and dandelions. The impossibility of the lives there, the miracle of survival. For Hayan Charara, every city is a holy city, every heart a holy hear.

–Jim Daniels