Dispatches from the Land of Erasure: Essays and Conversations

Drawn from a decade of writing and conversations by Arab American poet and writer Philip Metres, Dispatches from the Land of Erasure redefines the writer’s role as a catalyst for justice and a resister of empire. Gathering together a wide range of writing and writers, particularly from Arab and Black diaspora, Dispatches reports on what white imperial culture attempts to erase, while uplifting the voices and people who resist that erasure, offering a vision of a more just and peaceful world.

With keen insight into the lived experience of Arab Americans and other historically marginalized communities, the book explores the struggle for a just peace through reading Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jewish writers of conscience who contend with the wall of silence around the issue of Palestine. Further, Dispatches illuminates how to write a poetry of peace and justice, and how poetic activism and activist poets situate themselves in communities seeking change. Divided into four sections--Erasing the Erasures: Writing While Arab, On Palestine, The Poetics of Justice, and The Poetics of Peacebuilding--Dispatches weaves personal essays, cultural criticism, group chats, interviews, literary analysis, reviews, and roundtables that include luminaries like Mosab Abu Toha, Hayan Charara, Sahar Khalifeh, Marwa Helal, Erika Meitner, Naomi Shihab Nye, Craig Santos Perez, and M. NourbeSe Philip. Together, the book models the crucial need for robust dialogue to overcome the echo chamber that limits the growth and reach of social movements and to dream of a future beyond the land of erasure.

Philip Metres is Professor of English and Director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. His books include over five collections of poems, five translations, and a previous book in the Poets on Poetry series, The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018). Metres has received many awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.