In Lisa Marchi’s book The Funambulists: Women Poets of the Arab Diaspora, the minor takes center stage, both as a source of aesthetics and as a portal to political ethics. Drawing on the metaphor of the funambulist—the tightrope walker—Marchi situates the six Arab diasporic women poets in her study as deft navigators of tensions and contradictions wrought by multiple homes and languages, an unjust political status quo, and by the microscale and macroscale. These funambulists, she writes, “use their art of balance and flexibility together with a good portion of courage and transgression to walk a tightrope stretched across continents, cultures, and faiths” (p. 5). This is a study of diasporic writing that avoids circumscribing categories such as the nation, language, and migrant writing. Rather than emphasizing one aspect of their belonging, Marchi traces each poet’s individual journey. The result is a study that is comparative, transnational, and multilingual, and above all, contrapuntal. She suggests that these poets “patiently compose a polyphony out of soloist voices, by according full dignity to minor events and neglected places, people, and objects on earth” (p. 10) and, in so doing, mobilize poetry to sensitize attention to the political, including the potential for more just and sustainable futures.

Part 1, “Encounters,” is composed of the two chapters “The Everyday as Protean and Enchanting: Naomi Shihab Nye’s Tender Spot” and “The Everyday as Claustrophobic and Stale: Iman Mersal’s These Are Not Oranges, My Love.” In the chapter on Nye, Marchi argues that attention to the everyday and the minor becomes a query into the fabric that binds people and places together, even as it includes discord and oppression. Nye, who was born in and lives in the United States and writes in English, also lived in Jerusalem as a child, her writing connecting to Palestinian legacies of struggle through daily action. In her analysis of Nye’s collection Tender Spot (2008), Marchi locates a micropolitics in Nye’s evocation of mundane objects and overlooked experiences, arguing that they reveal broader philosophical inquiries into social and political ills, all the while creating pathways to seeing the mundane with new eyes as common ground, entanglement, and a space of learning.

This probing into the everyday continues in the chapter on Iman Mersal’s poetry. Mersal, who began writing as a part of the 1990s generation and within feminist circles in Egypt, has continued to write in Arabic after relocating to Canada. Her collection These Are Not Oranges, My Love (2008) conjures estrangement, discomfort, and (im)mobility. Marchi demonstrates that Mersal, who writes of Canada and Egypt, avoids both idealization of the “West” and nostalgia for home. Her “often dissonant and recalcitrant poetics” (p. 46) connects the intimate and the political in, for example, the spectacles of authoritarianism, the hospital bed of a loved one, or spaces shared with strangers. Marchi’s reading of Mersal’s poem “Dukkan Kharaʾit" (“Map Store”) traces a journey in which maps are transformed from coercive tools of colonialism to a means for individuals to signal their attachment to places (however small), even as they continue to signal tension. In Marchi’s reading these layers evoke Mersal’s grassroots fashioning of geographies and refusal of hierarchies.

Part 2, “Crossings,” includes “Maritime Crossings: Mina Boulhanna’s ‘Immigrata’ and ‘Africa’” and “Oceanic Crossings: Nadine Ltaif’s Ce que vous ne lirez pas [What You Will Not Read]” and focuses on geographic crossroads. The short chapter on Mina Boulhanna’s two poems, which were written in Italian and published in a 1996 anthology of migrant writing, takes on the difficult questions of why Boulhanna did not continue to publish and what place there is in the Italian literary field for a writer with Moroccan roots who invokes racism and colonialism. Although Marchi notes that Boulhanna’s framing of the racialized and gendered migrant sometimes falls into stereotypes of victimization, her reading of her work takes seriously the desolation conjured in the poetry. Reading absence, Marchi assembles a novel set of theoretical interventions that includes ghurba (estrangement / exile / alienation) in modern Moroccan literature, and a much longer history of Mediterranean travel and intellectual exchange, such as accounts by geographer al-Idrisi and historical chronicles on the death of Ibn Rushd.

In the following chapter, Marchi situates Nadine Ltaif’s poetry within Québec’s littératures de l’intranquilité (literatures of disquiet) even as far-reaching travels and crossings are explored. Nadine Ltaif was born in Cairo, grew up in Lebanon, and moved to Montréal during the Lebanese civil war. She writes in French in a poetic oeuvre that extends from the 1980s to the present. Her collection Ce que vous ne lirez pas (2010) evokes travels to India, Andalusia, and Lebanon through sites of memory such as paintings, architecture, and specters that conjure both mourning and conflict. Marchi’s reading of Ltaif’s poem “Fourmilière” (Anthill) evokes parallels between Beirut and Montreal in a critique of how violence can be willfully forgotten. Marchi emphasizes Ltaif’s move away from binaries and toward entanglement, the in-between, and pluralistic foundations for belonging, showing that Ltaif’s exploration of memory is placed in service of critical observation, mourning, and attentiveness to signs of rebirth.

The third and last section, “Breaks” consists of the chapters “Breaking Love as an Ideal: Maram al-Massri’s A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor” and “Afro-Arab Beats: Suheir Hammad’s breaking poems,” and probes how “breaks” in poetry can chart new geographies of care and justice. Al-Massri was born in Syria, began publishing in the 1970s, and moved to Paris in 1982, where she continues to write in Arabic. Marchi characterizes al-Massri’s exploration of love and sexuality as both “quotidian and deeply sensuous” (p. 111). Her collection A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor (2004) confronts idealized notions of marriage and domesticity and, in its frank evocations of love, excavates physicality and brief intimate encounters, as well as disappointment and disequilibrium. Marchi argues that al-Massri’s poems break with masculine love poetry genres, not least in their attention to female desire and challenge to binary understandings of gender. She suggests that the erotic “is performed as a powerful affective tool to concretely alter power relations both in the intimate and public spheres” (p. 126), breaking with notions of the (gendered) ideal citizen and placing poetry “as a force that may (re-)create that vital, perhaps tumultuous, and always insecure hope” (p. 129).

In the final chapter on Suheir Hammad, “breaks” refer to both poetic form and geographies of rupture and transformation. Hammad was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan and grew up in Beirut and then in Brooklyn, NY. Marchi probes Hammad’s many influences, including Black spoken word traditions and music, Arabic poetry recitation, hip hop, and tarab (musical ecstasy). In Hammad’s mostly English-language poetry breaks manifest in broken syntax, but also symbolically as breaks with monolingualism and mono-emplacement. Hammad’s juxtaposition of languages, spiritual traditions, and cities performs rupture and relation, an interrelatedness that challenges homogenous identity categories. Marchi’s compelling reading of Hammad’s poetic response to June Jordan’s poem “Moving Towards Home,” titled “Break (still)” takes up June’s call for “living room” in the face of deadly violence, both as indictment of racialized violence and invocation of intimate gathering space.

The Funambulists mobilizes a diverse and erudite set of critical frameworks without losing sight of the poetry’s specificity. A feminist engagement with the everyday remains central, alongside contingent understandings of belonging. The tightrope is not only a stage of tension, it also is a site of connection and a place from which new geographies of justice and mutual dignity can be imagined. Marchi’s vision is utopian at times, but also a reminder that the poetic can serve as a compass. The poets discussed do not subscribe to the poet-as-prophet trope. Rather, as Marchi suggests, “they juxtapose, bind together, and contrapuntally read divergent histories” (p. 153), to enact what Susan Koshy calls a “minority cosmopolitanism” or what Edward Said termed a “worldly literature.” One of the joys of reading this book is the inclusion of so much poetry, both in its original Arabic, English, French, and Italian, and in translation. It allows readers to form their own perspectives in dialogue with the author. Here, the inclusion of more lines from Mina Boulhanna’s poems would have been welcome. All in all, Marchi’s study offers an illuminating and enlivening study of the place of poetry at a time of political paralysis and a reminder of the way the micro connects to the macro, sometimes in hopeful and unexpected ways.