Winner of the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize
Poet Zeina Hashem Beck’s timely collection Louder Than Hearts shakes the reader awake and reminds us of poetry’s power to bridge culture and language, putting words to the unsayable happening all around us. They act as both a slap and a salve for dealing with the tragic events that have become the everyday.
Naomi Shihab Nye, award-winner author
I don’t know how Zeina Hashem Beck is able to do this. Her poems feel like whole worlds—potent conversations with the self, the soul, the many landscapes of being, and the news that confounds us all. They weave two languages into a perfect fabric of presence, with an almost mystical sense of pacing and power. “You Fixed It” might be one of the masterpieces of our time. There is death, loss, disaster, but more importantly, an exquisite sense of reviving language and poetry—anthems of life, love, respect, abounding. Everything Arabic we treasure comes alive in these poems. Readers will feel restored to so many homes, revived, amazed. Zeina Hashem Beck writes with a brilliant, absolutely essential voice.
