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Philip Metres is the author and translator of ten books and a handful of chapbooks, including The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan 2018); Pictures at an Exhibition (University of Akron 2016), winner of the Akron Poetry Prize; Sand Opera (Alice James 2015), honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award; I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State Poetry Center, 2015), shortlisted for the PEN Translation Award and the Read Russia Prize; Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Poetic Texts of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014), longlisted for the National Translation Award; A Concordance of Leaves (Diode 2013)and abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine 2011), both of which won the Arab American Book Award; To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008); and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa 2007).
His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, numerous journals and anthologies, and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Lannan Fellowship, the George S. Hunt, S.J. Prize, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Anne Halley Prize, the PEN/Heim Translation grant, a Russian Institute for Literary Translation grant, and the Creative Workforce Fellowship. He is professor of English and the director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University in Cleveland.
The book mentioned in the interview is: Irish on the Inside by Tom Hayden.
[…] Philip Metres is currently involved in a number of projects. The More You Love the Motherland, a memoir about his time living in Russia is his particular obsession at this time. For Metres, a poet, writing in this format is an exciting departure. Metres has a book coming out this fall called The Sound of Listening, a collection of essays about the role of poetic arts in our lives. It is Metres belief that art plays a critical role in creating spaces where politics can begin and being can happen in new ways. In writing this book, Metres sought to invite readers to rethink the boundaries they place around poetry. Metres is also finishing up revision on a work due out in 2020 titled Shrapnel Maps which examines the Holy Land from various perspectives. While much of the resource material for this and other books Metres has written comes from documents, he believes in the importance of standing in the ground of his own experience. Metres poem from a sequence called Home Front touches upon the experience of post-9/11 air travel as an Arab, what that meant for him and how others looked at him deciding quietly who they thought he might be. It also touches on his own internal struggle and the inexplicable fear that in fact he might be who they think despite knowing the reality of the situation. To hear more from Phillip Metres including readings of several poems, listen to the complete interview. […]